THE

SUMMONS

BY

A.E.W. MASON

AUTHOR OF "THE FOUR FEATHERS," "THE TURNSTILE," ETC.

NEW YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1920.
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THOSE
WHO SERVED WITH ME ABROAD
THROUGH THE FOUR YEARS

CONTENTS

THE SUMMONS

CHAPTER I

The Olympic Games

"Lutrell! Lutrell!"

Sir Charles Hardiman stood in the corridor of his steam yacht and bawled the name through a closed door. But no answer was returned from the other side of the door. He turned the handle and went in. The night was falling, but the cabin windows looked towards the north and the room was full of light and of a low and pleasant music. For the tide tinkled and chattered against the ship's planks and, in the gardens of the town across the harbour, bands were playing. The town was Stockholm in the year nineteen hundred and twelve, and on this afternoon, the Olympic games, that unfortunate effort to promote goodwill amongst the nations, which did little but increase rancours and disclose hatreds, had ended, never, it is to be hoped, to be resumed.

"Luttrell," cried Hardiman again, but this time with perplexity in his voice. For Luttrell was there in the cabin in front of him, but sunk in so deep a contemplation of memories and prospects that the cabin might just as well have been empty. Sir Charles Hardiman touched him on the shoulder.

"Wake up, old man!"

"That's what I am doing—waking up," said Luttrell, turning without any start. He was seated in front of the writing-desk, a young man, as the world went before the war, a few months short of twenty-eight.

"The launch is waiting and everybody's on deck," continued Hardiman. "We shall lose our table at Hasselbacken if we don't get off."

Then he caught sight of a telegram lying upon the writing-table.

"Oh!" and the impatience died out of his voice. "Is anything the matter?"

Luttrell pushed the telegram towards his host.

"Read it! I have got to make up my mind—and now—before we start."

Hardiman read the telegram. It was addressed to Captain Harry Luttrell, Yacht The Dragonfly, Stockholm, and it was sent from Cairo by the Adjutant-General of the Egyptian Army.

"I can make room for you, but you must apply immediately to be transferred."

Hardiman sat down in a chair by the side of the table against the wall, with his eyes on Luttrell's face. He was a big, softish, overfed man of forty-five, and the moment he began to relax from the upright position, his body went with a run; he collapsed rather than sat. The little veins were beginning to show like tiny scarlet threads across his nose and on the fullness of his cheeks; his face was the colour of wine; and the pupils of his pale eyes were ringed with so pronounced an arcus senilis that they commanded the attention like a disfigurement. But the eyes were shrewd and kindly enough as they dwelt upon the troubled face of his guest.

"You have not answered this?" he asked.

"No. But I must send an answer to-night."

"You are in doubt?"

"Yes. I was quite sure when I cabled to Cairo on the second day of the games. I was quite sure, whilst I waited for the reply. Now that the reply has come—I don't know."

"Let me hear," said the older man. "The launch must wait, the table at the Hasselbacken restaurant must be assigned, if need be, to other customers." Hardiman had not swamped all his kindliness in good living. Luttrell was face to face with one of the few grave decisions which each man has in the course of his life to make; and Hardiman understood his need better than he understood it himself. His need was to formulate aloud the case for and against, to another person, not so much that he might receive advice as, that he might see for himself with truer eyes.

"The one side is clear enough," said Luttrell with a trace of bitterness. "There was a Major I once heard of at Dover. He trained his company in night-marches by daylight. The men held a rope to guide them and were ordered to shut their eyes. The Major, you see, hated stirring out at night. He liked his bridge and his bottle of port. Well, give me another year and that's the kind of soldier I shall become—the worst kind—the slovenly soldier. I mean slovenly in mind, in intention. Even now I come, already bored, to the barrack square and watch the time to see if I can't catch an earlier train from Gravesend to London."

"And when you do?" asked Hardiman.

Luttrell nodded.

"When I do," he agreed, "I get no thrill out of my escape, I assure you. I hate myself a little more—that's all."

"Yes," said Hardiman. He was too wise a man to ask questions. He just sat and waited, inviting Luttrell to spread out his troubles by his very quietude.

"Then there are these games," Luttrell cried in a swift exasperation, "—these damned games! From the first day when the Finns marched out with their national flag and the Russians threatened to withdraw if they did it again——" he broke off suddenly. "Of course you know soldiers have believed that trouble's coming. I used to doubt, but by God I am sure of it now. Just a froth of fine words at the opening and afterwards—honest rivalry and let the best man win? Not a bit of it! Team-running—a vile business—the nations parked together in different sections of the Stadium like enemies—and ill-will running here and there like an infection! Oh, there's trouble coming, and if I don't go I shan't be fit for it. There, that's the truth."

"The whole truth and nothing but the truth?" Hardiman asked with a smile. He leaned across the table and drew towards him a case of telegraph forms. But whilst he was drawing them towards him, Luttrell spoke again.

"Nothing but the truth—yes," he said. He was speaking shyly, uncomfortably, and he stopped abruptly.

"The whole truth—no." Hardiman added slowly, and gently. He wanted the complete story from preface to conclusion, but he was not to get it. He received no answer of any kind for a considerable number of moments and Luttrell only broke the silence in the end, to declare definitely,

"That, at all events, is all I have to say."

Sir Charles nodded and drew the case of forms close to him. There was something more then. There always is something more, which isn't told, he reflected, and the worst of it is, the something more which isn't told is always the real reason. Men go to the confessional with a reservation; the secret chamber where they keep their sacred vessels, their real truths and inspirations, as also their most scarlet sins—that shall be opened to no one after early youth is past unless it be—rarely—to one woman. There was another reason at work in Harry Luttrell, but Sir Charles Hardiman was never to know it. With a shrug of his shoulders he took a pencil from his pocket, filled up one of the forms and handed it to Luttrell.

"That's what I should reply."

He had written:

"I am travelling to London to-morrow to apply for transfer.—Luttrell."

Luttrell read the telegram with surprise. It was not the answer which he had expected from the victim of the flesh-pots in front of him.

"You advise that?" he exclaimed.

"Yes. My dear Luttrell, as you know, you are a guest very welcome to me. But you don't belong. We—Maud Carstairs, Tony Marsh and the rest of us—even Mario Escobar—we are the Come-to-nothings. We are the people of the stage door, we grow fat in restaurants. From three to seven, you may find us in the card-rooms of our clubs—we are jolly fine fellows—and no good. You don't belong, and should get out while you can."

Luttrell moved uncomfortably in his chair.

"That's all very well. But there's another side to the question," he said, and from the deck above a woman's voice called clearly down the stairway.

"Aren't you two coming?"

Both men looked towards the door.

"That side," said Hardiman.

"Yes."

Hardiman nodded his head.

"Stella Croyle doesn't belong either," he said. "But she kicked over the traces. She flung out of the rank and file. Oh, I know Croyle was a selfish, dull beast and her footprints in her flight from him were littered with excuses. I am not considering the injustice of the world. I am looking at the cruel facts, right in the face of them, as you have got to do, my young friend. Here Stella Croyle is—with us—and she can't get away. You can."

Luttrell was not satisfied. His grey eyes and thin, clean features were troubled like those of a man in physical pain.

"You don't know the strange, queer tie between Stella Croyle and me," he said. "And I can't tell you it."

Hardiman grew anxious. Luttrell had the look of a man overtrained, and it was worry which had overtrained him. His face was a trifle too delicate, perhaps, to go with those remorseless sharp decisions which must be made by the men who win careers.

"I know that you can't go through the world without hurting people," cried Hardiman. "Neither you nor any one else, except the limpets. And you won't escape hurting Stella Croyle, by abandoning your chances. Your love-affair will end—all of that kind do. And yours will end in a bitter, irretrievable quarrel after you have ruined yourself, and because you have ruined yourself. You are already on the rack—make no doubt about it. Oh, I have seen you twitch and jump with irritation—how many times on this yacht!—for trumpery, little, unimportant things she has said and done, which you would never have noticed six months ago; or only noticed to smile at with a pleased indulgence."

Luttrell's face coloured. "Why, that's true enough," he said. He was remembering the afternoon a week ago, when the yacht steamed between the green islands with their bathing stations and châlets, over a tranquil, sunlit sea of the deepest blue. Rounding a wooded corner towards sunset she came suddenly upon the bridges and the palace and the gardens of Stockholm. The women of the party were in the saloon. A rush was made towards it. They were summoned to this first wonderful view of the city of beauty. Would they come? No! Stella Croyle was in the middle of a game of Russian patience. She could play that game any day, every day, all day. This exquisite vision was vouchsafed to her but the once, and she had neglected it with the others. She had not troubled, even to move so far as the saloon door. For she had not finished her game.

Luttrell recalled his feeling of scorn; the scorn had grown into indignation; in the end he had made a grievance of her indifference to this first view of the city of Stockholm; a foolish, exasperating grievance, which would rankle, which would not be buried, which sprang to fresh life at each fresh sight of her. Yes, of a certainty, sooner or later Stella Croyle and he would quarrel, so bitterly that all the king's horses and all the king's men could never bring them again together; and over some utterly unimportant matter like the first view of Stockholm.

"Youth has many privileges over age," continued Hardiman, "but none greater than the vision, the half-interpreted recurring vision of wider spaces and greater things, towards which you sail on the wind of a great emotion. Sooner or later, a man loses that vision and then only knows his loss. Stay here, and you'll lose it before your time."

Luttrell looked curiously at his companion, wondering what manner of man he had been in his twenties. Hardiman answered the look with a laugh. "Oh, I, too, had my ambitions once."

Luttrell folded the cablegram which Hardiman had written out and placed it in the breast pocket of his dinner-jacket.

"I will talk to Stella to-night at dinner. Then, if I decide to send it, I can send it from the hotel over there at the landing-steps before we return to the yacht."

Sir Charles Hardiman rose cumbrously with a shrug of his shoulders. He had done his best, but since Luttrell would talk the question over with Stella Croyle, shoulder to shoulder with her amongst the lights and music, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils and the pleading of her eyes within his sight—he, Charles Hardiman, might as well have held his tongue.

So very likely it would have been. But when great matters are ripe for decisions one way or the other, the little accident as often as not decides. There was a hurrying of light feet in the corridor outside, a swift, peremptory knocking upon the door. The same woman's voice called in rather a shrill note through the panels! "Harry! Why don't you come? We are waiting for you."

And in the sound of the voice there was not merely impatience, but a note of ownership—very clear and definite; and hearing it Luttrell hardened. He stood up straight. He had the aspect of a man in revolt.

CHAPTER II

An Anthem Intervenes

Upon the entrance of Hardiman's party a wrinkle was smoothed away from the forehead of a maître d'hôtel.

"So! You have come!" he cried. "I began to despair."

"You have kept my table?" Sir Charles insisted.

"Yes, but with what an effort of diplomacy!"; and the maître d'hôtel led his guests to the very edge of the great balcony. Here the table was set endwise to the balustrade, commanding the crowded visitors, yet taking the coolness of the night. Hardiman was contented with his choice of its position. But when he saw his guests reading the cards which assigned them their places, he was not so contented with the order of their seating.

"If I had known an hour before!" he said to himself, and the astounding idea crept into his mind that perhaps it was, after all, a waste to spend so much time on the disposition of a dinner-table and the ordering of food.

However, the harm was done now. There was Luttrell already seated at the end against the balustrade. He had the noise of a Babel of tongues and the glitter of a thousand lights upon his left hand; upon his right, the stars burning bright in a cool gloom of deepest purple, and far below the riding-lamps of the yachts tossing on the water like yellow flowers in a garden; whilst next to him, midway between the fragrant darkness and the hard glitter, revealing, as she always did, a kinship with each of them, sat Stella Croyle.

"I should have separated them," Hardiman reflected uneasily as he raised and drank his cocktail. "But how the deuce could I without making everybody stare? This party wasn't got up to separate people. All the same——"

The hushed wonder of a summer night. The gaiety of a bright thronged restaurant! In either setting Stella Croyle was a formidable antagonist. But combine the settings and she took to herself, at once by nature, the seduction of both!

"Poor devil, he won't have a dog's chance!" the baronet concluded; and he watched approvingly what appeared to him to be Luttrell's endeavour to avoid joining battle on this unfavourable field. He could only trust feebly in that and in the strength of the "something else," the secret reason he was never to know.

It was about half-way through dinner when Stella Croyle, who had directed many a furtive, anxious glance to the averted face of her companion, attacked directly.

"What is the matter with you to-night?" she asked, interrupting him in the midst of a rattle of futilities. "Why should you recite to me from the guide-book about the University of Upsala?"

"It appears to be most interesting, and quaint," replied Luttrell hastily.

"Then we might hire a motor-car and run out there to luncheon. To-morrow! Just you and I."

"No." Harry Luttrell exclaimed suddenly and Stella Croyle drew back. Her face clouded. She had won the first round, but victory brought her no ease. She knew now from the explosion of his "No" and the swift alarm upon his face that something threatened her.

"You must tell me what has happened," she cried. "You must! Oh, you turn away from me!"

From the dark steep garden at their feet rose a clamour of cheers—to Luttrell an intervention of Providence.

"Listen," he said.

Here and there a man or a woman rose at the dinner tables and looked down. Upwards along a glimmering riband of path, a group of students bore one of their number shoulder-high. Luttrell leaned over the balustrade. The group below halted; speeches were made; cheers broke out anew.

"It is the Swedish javelin-thrower. He won the championship of the world this afternoon."

"Did he?" asked Stella Croyle in a soft voice at his side. "Does he throw javelins as well as you? You wound me every time."

Luttrell raised his head. It was not fear of defeat which had kept his looks averted from Stella's dark and starry eyes. No thought of lists set and a contest to be fought out had even entered his head. But he did fear to see those eyes glisten with tears—for she so seldom shed them! And even more than the evidence of her pain he feared the dreadful submission with which women in the end receive the stroke of fortune. He had to meet her gaze now, however.

"I put off telling you," he began lamely.

"So that this evening of mine with you might not be spoilt," she returned. "But, my dear, my evening was already spoilt before the launch left the yacht gangway. I am not so blind."

Stella Croyle was at this date twenty-six years old; and it was difficult to picture her any older. Partly because of her vivid colouring and because she was abrim with life; partly because in her straightness of limb and the clear treble of her voice, she was boyish. "What a pretty boy she would make!" was the first thought until you noticed the slim delicacy of her hands and feet, the burnish of gold on the dark wealth of her hair, the fine chiselling of brow and nose and chin. Then it was seen that she was all woman. She was tall and yet never looked tall. It seemed that you could pick her up with a finger, but try and she warned you of the weakness of your arm. She was a baffling person. She ran and walked with the joyous insolence of eighteen, yet at any moment some veil might be rolled up in her eyes and face to show you for one tragic instant a Lady of Sorrows.

She leaned towards Luttrell, and as Hardiman had foreseen the perfume of her hair stormed his senses.

"Tell me!" she breathed, and Luttrell, with his arguments and reasons cut and dried and conned over pat for delivery, began nevertheless to babble. There were the Olympic Games. She herself must have seen how they were fatal to their own purpose. Troubles were coming—battles behind the troubles. All soldiers knew! They knew this too—the phrase of a young Lieutenant-Colonel lecturing at the Staff College.

"Battles are not won either by sheer force or pure right, but by the one or the other of those two Powers which has Discipline as its Chief of Staff."

He was implying neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and she would know surely enough when those words were rising to his lips which it was necessary that she should mark and understand. Meanwhile her perplexities and fears grew.

"Of course it can't be that," she assured herself again and again, but with a dreadful catch at her heart. "Oh no, it can't be that."

"That," was the separation which some day or another—after a long and wondrous period—both were agreed, must come. But, consoling herself with the thought that she would be prepared, she had always set the day on so distant an horizon that it had no terrors for her. Now it suddenly dismayed her, a terror close at hand. Here on this crowded balcony joyous with lights and gay voices and invaded by all the subtle invitations of a summer night above the water! Oh no, it was not possible!

Luttrell put his hand to his breast pocket and Stella watched and listened now with all her soul. More than once during dinner she had seen him touch that pocket in an abstraction. He drew from it two papers, one the cablegram which he had received from Cairo, the other Hardiman's reply. He handed her the first of the two.

"This reached me this morning."

Stella Croyle studied the paper with her heart in her mouth. But the letters would not be still.

"Oh, what does it mean?" she cried.

"It offers me service abroad."

Stella's face flushed and turned white. She bent her head over the cablegram.

"At Cairo," she said, with a little gasp of relief. After all Cairo was not so far. A week, and one was at Cairo.

"Further south, in the Sudan—Heaven knows where!"

"Too far then?" she suggested. "Too far."

"For you? Yes! Too far," Luttrell replied.

Stella lifted a tragic face towards him; and though he winced he met her eyes.

"But you are not going! You can't go!"

Luttrell handed to her the second paper.

"You never wrote this," she said very quickly.

"Yet it is what I would have written."

Stella Croyle shot one swift glance at Sir Charles Hardiman. She had recognised his handwriting. Hardiman was in Luttrell's cabin while the rest of the party waited on the deck and the launch throbbed at the gangway. If a woman's glance had power, he would have been stricken that instant. But she wasted no more than a glance upon the worldly-wiseman at the head of their table. She turned again to the first telegram.

"This is an answer, this cablegram from Cairo?"

"Yes."

"To a cable of yours?"

"Sent three days ago."

The answers she received were clear, unhesitating. It was a voice from a rock speaking! So utterly mistaken was she; and so completely Luttrell bent every nerve to the service of shortening the hour of misery. The appalling moment was then actually upon her. She had foreseen it—so she thought. But it caught her nevertheless unprepared as death catches a sinner on his bed.

She stared at the telegrams—not reading them. His arguments and prefaces—the Olympic Games, Discipline and the rest of it—what she had caught of them, she blew away as so much froth. She dived to the personal reason.

"You are tired of me."

"No," Luttrell answered hotly. "That's not true—not even a half-truth. If I were tired of you, it would all be so easy, so brutally easy."

"But you are!" Her voice rose shrill in its violence. "You know you are but you are too much of a coward to say so—oh, like all men!" and as Luttrell turned to her a face startled by her outcry and uttered a remonstrant "Hush!", she continued bitterly, "What do I care if they all hear? I am impossible! You know that, don't you? I am quite impossible! I have gone my own way. I am one of the people you hate—one of the Undisciplined."

Stella Croyle hardly knew in her passion what she was saying, and Luttrell could only wait in silence for the storm to pass. It passed with a quickness which caught him at loss; so quickly she swept from mood to mood.

He heard her voice at his ear, remorseful and most appealing. "Oh, Wub, what have I done that you should treat me so?"

Sir Charles Hardiman, watchful of the duel, guessed from the movement of her lips what she was saying.

"These nicknames are the very devil," he exclaimed, apparently about nothing, to his startled neighbour. "The first thing a woman does when she's fond of a man is to give him some ridiculous name, which doesn't belong to him. She worries her wits trying this one and that one, as a tailor tries on you a suit of clothes, and when she has got your fit, she uses it—publicly. So others use it too and so it no longer contents her. Then she invents a variation, a nickname within a nickname, and that she keeps to herself, for her own private use. That's the nickname I am referring to, my dear, when I say it's the very devil."

The lady to whom he spoke smiled vaguely and surmised that he might be very right. For herself, she said, she had invented no nicknames; which was to assert that she had never been in love. For the practice seems invariable, and probably Dido in times long since gone by had one for Æneas, and Virgil knew all about it. But since she was a woman, it would be a name at once so absurd and so intimate that it would never have gone with the dignified rhythm of the hexameter. "Wobbles" had been the first name which Stella Croyle had invented for Harry Luttrell, though by what devious process she had lighted upon it, psychology could not have discovered. "Wub" was the nickname within the nickname, the cherished sign that the two of them lived apart in a little close-hedged garden of their own. Luttrell's eyes were upon her as she spoke it. And she spoke it with a curious little wistful pursing of soft lips so that it came to him winged with the memory of all her kisses.

"Oh, Wub, must you leave me?" she pleaded in a breaking whisper. "What will be left to me if you do?"

Luttrell dropped his forehead in his hands. All the character which he had in those untried days bade him harden himself against the appeal. But his resolution was melting like metal in a furnace. He tried to realise the truth which Hardiman had uttered three or four hours before. There would be sooner or later a quarrel, a humiliating, hateful quarrel over some miserable trifle which neither Stella nor he would ever afterwards forgive. But her voice was breaking with a sob in a whisper at his ear and how could he look forward so far?

"Stella!"

He turned impulsively towards her.

"The game's up," reflected Sir Charles Hardiman at the end of the table. "Calypso wins—no, by God!"

For before Luttrell could speak another word, the music crashed and all that assemblage was on its feet. The orchestra was playing the Swedish National Anthem; and upon that, one after the other, followed the hymns of the peoples who had taken part in the Games. In turn the representatives of each people stood and resumed their seat, the music underlining their individuality and parking them in sections, even as rivalry had parked them in the Stadium. The majestic anthem of Russia, the pæan of the Marseillaise, the livelier march of Italy, the song of Germany, the Star-Spangled Banner; and long before the band struck into the solemn rhythm of "God save the King," Stella Croyle at all events knew that Calypso had lost. For she saw a flame illumine Luttrell's face and transfigure him. He had slipped out of her reach. The doubts and perplexities which had so troubled him during the last months were now resolved. As he listened to the Hymns, he saw as in a vision the nations advancing abreast over a vast plain like battalions in line with their intervals for manœuvring spaced out between them. In front of each nation rolled a grey vapour, which gradually took shape before Luttrell's eyes; and there was made visible to him a shadowy legion of men marching in the van, the men who had left ease and women and all the grace of life behind them and had gone out to die in the harness of service—one in this, one in that corner of the untravelled world, and now all reunited in a strong fellowship. The vision remained with him after the last strains of music had died away, and faded slowly. He waked to the lights and clamour of the restaurant and turned to Stella Croyle.

"Stella," he began, and——

"I know," she interrupted in a small voice. She was sitting with her head downcast and her hands clenched upon her lap so tightly that the skin was white about the points where the tips of her fingers pressed. "Perhaps I shan't suffer so very much."

She was careful not to lift her head, and when a few moments later their host gave the signal to move, she rose quickly and turned her back on Luttrell.

The party motored back through the Dyurgarden, past the glimmering tents where the Boy-Scouts were encamped to the great hotel by the landing-stage. There a wait of a few minutes took place whilst Hardiman settled for the cars, and during that wait Luttrell disappeared. He rejoined his friends at the harbour steps and when the launch put off towards the Dragonfly, he found himself side by side with Stella Croyle. In the darkness she relaxed her guard. Luttrell saw the great tears glisten on her dark eyelashes and fall down her cheeks.

"I am sorry, Stella," he whispered, dropping his hand on hers, and she clutched it and let it go.

"Perhaps I shan't suffer so very much," she repeated and the next moment the gangway light shone down upon their faces. Stella dropped her head and furtively dried her cheeks.

"I want to go up last," she said, "and just behind you, so that no one shall see what a little fool I am making of myself."

But by some subtle understanding already it was felt amongst that group of people, quick to perceive troubles of the emotions, that something was amiss between the pair. They were left alone upon the deck. Stella by chance looking southwards to the starlit gloom, Luttrell to the north, where still the daylight played in blue and palest green and the delicate changing fires of the opal.

"What will you do, Stella?" Luttrell asked gently.

"I think I will go and live in the country," she replied.

"It will be lonely, child."

"There will be ghosts, my dear, to keep me company," she answered with a wan smile. "People like me always have to be a good deal alone, anyway. I shall be, of course, lonelier, now that I have no one to play with," and the smile vanished from her lips. She flung up her face towards the skies, letting her grief have its way upon that empty deck.

"So we shall never be together—just you and I—alone again," she said, forcing herself to realise that unintelligible thing. Her thoughts ran back over the year—the year of their alliance—and she saw all of its events flickering vividly before her, as they say drowning people do. "Oh, Wub, what a cruel mistake you made when you went out of your way to be kind," she cried, with the tears streaming down her face; and Luttrell winced.

"Yes, that's true," he admitted remorsefully. "I never dreamed what would come of it."

"You should have left me alone."

Amongst the flickering pictures of the year the first was the clearest. A great railway station in the West of England, a train drawn up at the departure platform, herself with a veil drawn close over her face, half running, half walking in a pitiful anguish towards the train; and then a man at her elbow. Harry Luttrell.

"I have reserved a compartment. I suspected that things were not going to turn out well. I thought the long journey to London alone would be terrible. If things had turned out right, you would not have seen me."

She had let him place her in a carriage, look after her wants as if she had been a child, hold her in his arms, tend her with the magnificent sympathy of his silence. That had been the real beginning. Stella had known him as the merest of friends before. She had met him here and there at a supper party, at a dancing club, at some Bohemian country house; and then suddenly he had guessed what others had not, and foolishly had gone out of his way to be kind.

"She would have died if I hadn't travelled with her," Luttrell argued silently. "She would have thrown herself out of the carriage, or when she reached home she would have——" and his argument stopped, and he glanced at her uneasily.

Undisciplined, was the epithet she had used of herself. You never knew what crazy thing she might do. There was daintiness but no order in her life; the only law she knew was given to her by a fastidious taste.

"Of course, Wub, I have always known that you never cared for me as I do for you. So it was bound to end some time." She caught his hand to her heart for a second, and then, dropping it, ran from his side.

CHAPTER III

Mario Escobar

Late in the autumn of the following year a new play, written by Martin Hillyard and named "The Dark Tower," was produced at the Rubicon Theatre in Panton Street, London. It was Hillyard's second play. His first, produced in April of the same year, had just managed to limp into July; and that small world which concerns itself with the individualities of playwrights was speculating with its usual divergencies upon Hillyard's future development.

"The Dark Tower" was a play of modern days, built upon the ancient passions. The first act was played to a hushed house, and while the applause which greeted the fall of the curtain was still rattling about the walls of the theatre, Sir Charles Hardiman hoisted himself heavily out of his stall and made his way to a box on the first tier, which he entered without knocking.

There was but one person in the box, a young man hidden behind a side curtain. Hardiman let himself collapse into a chair by the side of the young man.

"Seems all right," he said. "You have a story to tell. It's clear in every word, too, that you know where you are going. That makes people comfortable and inclined to go along with you."

Hillyard turned with a smile.

"We haven't come to the water jump yet," he said.

Hardiman remained in the box during the second act. He watched the stage for a while, took note of the laughter which welcomed this or that line, and of the silence which suddenly enclosed this or that scene from the rest of the play; and finally, with a certain surprise, and a certain amusement he fixed his attention upon the play's author. The act ended in laughter and Hillyard leaned back, and himself laughed, without pose or affectation, as heartily as any one in the theatre.

"You beat me altogether, my young friend," said Hardiman. "You ought to be walking up and down the pavement outside in the classical state of agitation. But you appear to be enjoying the play, as if you never had seen it before."

"And I haven't," Hillyard returned. "This isn't quite the play which we have been learning and rehearsing during the last month. Here's the audience at work, adding a point there, discovering an interpretation—yes, actually an interpretation—there, bringing into importance one scene, slipping over the next which we thought more important—altering it, in fact. Of course," and he returned to his earlier metaphor, "I know the big fences over which we may come a cropper. I can see them ahead before we come up to them and know the danger. We are over two of them, by the way. But on the whole I am more interested than nervous. It's the first time I have ever been to a first night, you see."

"Well, upon my word," cried Hardiman, "you are the coolest hand at it I ever saw." But he could have taken back his words the next moment.

In spite of Hillyard's aloof and disinterested air, the night had brought its excitement and in a strength of which he himself was unaware. It lifted now the veils behind which a man will hide his secret thoughts! He turned swiftly to Hardiman with a boyish light upon his face.

"Oh, I am not in doubt of what to-night means to me! Not for a moment. If it's failure, it means that I begin again to-morrow on something else; and again after that, and again after that, until success does come. Playwriting is my profession, and failures are a necessary part of it—just as much a part as the successes. But even if the great success were to come now, it wouldn't mean quite so much to me perhaps as it might to other people." He paused, and a smile broke upon his face. "I live expecting a messenger. There! That's my secret delivered over to you under the excitement of a first night."

And as he spoke the colour mounted into his face. He turned away in confusion. His play was nearer at his heart than he had thought; the enthusiasm which seemed to be greeting it had stirred him unwisely.

"Tell me," he said hurriedly, "who all these people in the stalls are."

He peeped down between the edge of the curtain and the side wall of the box whilst Hardiman stood up behind him.

"Yes, I will be your man from Cook's," said Hardiman genially.

His heart warmed to the young man both on account of his outburst and of the shame which had followed upon the heels of it. Few beliefs had survived in Hardiman after forty years of wandering up and down the flowery places of the earth; but one—he had lectured Harry Luttrell upon it on a night at Stockholm—continually gained strength in him. Youth must beget visions and man must preserve them if great work were to be done; and so easily the visions lost their splendour and their inspiration. Of all the ways of tarnishing the vision, perhaps talk was the most murderous. Hillyard possessed them. Hillyard was ashamed that he had spoken of them. Therefore he had some chance of retaining them.

"Yes, I will show you the celebrities." He pointed out the leading critics and the blue stockings of the day. His eyes roamed over the stalls. "Do you see the man with the broad face and the short whiskers in the fourth row? The man who looks just a little too like a country gentleman to be one? That is Sir Chichester Splay. He made a fortune in a murky town of Lancashire, and, thirsting for colour, came up to London determined to back a musical comedy. That is the way the craving for colour takes them in the North. His wish was gratified. He backed 'The Patchouli Girl,' and in that shining garden he got stung. He is now what they call an amateur. No first night is complete without him. He is the half-guinea Mecænas of our days."

Hillyard looked down at Sir Chichester Splay and smiled at his companion's description.

"You will meet him to-night at supper, and if your play is a success—not otherwise—you will stay with him in Sussex."

"No!" cried Hillyard; but Sir Charles was relentless in his insistence.

"You will. His wife will see to that. Who the pretty girl beside him is I do not know. But the more or less young man on the other side of her, talking to her with an air of intimacy a little excessive in a public place, is Mario Escobar. He is a Spaniard, and has the skin-deep politeness of his race. He is engaged in some sort of business, frequents some sort of society into which he is invited by the women, and he is not very popular amongst men. He belongs, however, to some sort of club. That is all I know about him. One would think he had guessed we were speaking of him," Hardiman added.

For at that moment Mario Escobar raised his dark, sleek head, and his big, soft eyes—the eyes of a beautiful woman—looked upwards to the box. It seemed to Hillyard for a moment that they actually exchanged a glance, though he himself was out of sight behind the curtain, so direct was Escobar's gaze. It was, however, merely the emptiness of the box which had drawn the Spaniard's attention. He was neatly groomed, of a slight figure, tall, and with his eyes, his thin olive face, his small black moustache and clean-cut jaw he made without doubt an effective and arresting figure.

"Now turn your head," said Hardiman, "the other way, and notice the big, fair man in the back row of the stalls. He is a rival manager, and he is explaining in a voice loud enough to be heard by the first rows of the pit, the precise age of your leading lady. Now look down! There is a young girl flitting about the stalls. She is an actress, not very successful. But to-night she is as busy as a bee. She is crabbing your play. Yesterday her opinion on the subject was of no value, and it will be again of no value to-morrow. But as one of the limited audience on a first night, she can do just a tiny bit of harm. But don't hold it against her, Hillyard! She has no feeling against you. This is her little moment of importance."

Sir Charles rattled on through the interval—all good nature with just a slice of lemon—and it had happened that he had pointed out one who was to be the instrument of great trouble for Hillyard and a few others, with whom this story is concerned.

Hillyard interrupted Hardiman.

"Who is the girl at the end of the sixth row, who seems to have stepped down from a china group on a mantelpiece?"

"That one?" said Hardiman, and all the raillery faded from his face. "That is Mrs. Croyle. You will meet her to-night at my supper party." He hesitated as to what further he should say. "You might do worse than be a friend to her. She is not, I am afraid, very happy."

Hillyard was surprised at the sudden gentleness of his companion's voice, and looked quickly towards him. Hardiman answered the look as he got heavily up from his chair.

"I sometimes fear that I have some responsibility for her unhappiness. But there are things one cannot help."

The light in the auditorium went down while Hardiman was leaving the box, and the curtain rose on the third act of "The Dark Tower." Of that play, however, you may read in the files of the various newspapers, if you will. This story is concerned with Martin Hillyard, not his work. It is sufficient to echo the words of Sir Chichester Splay when Hillyard was introduced to him an hour and a half later in the private supper-room at the Semiramis Hotel.

"A good play, Mr. Hillyard. Not a great play, of course, but quite a good play," said Sir Chichester with just the necessary patronage to tickle Hillyard to an appreciation of Hardiman's phrases—a ten and six-penny Mecænas.

"I am grateful that it has earned your good opinion," he replied.

"Oh, not at all!" cried Sir Chichester, and catching a lady who passed by the arm. "Stella, Mr. Hillyard should know you. This is Mrs. Croyle. I hope you will meet him some day at Rackham Park."

Sir Chichester trotted away to greet the manager of the Daily Harpoon, who was at that moment shaking hands with Hardiman.

"I congratulate you," said Stella Croyle, as she gave him her hand.

"Thank you. So you know Sir Chichester well?"

"His wife has been a friend of mine for a long time." Her eyes twinkled. "I wonder you have not been seen at his house."

"Oh, I am only just hatched out," said Hillyard. They both laughed. "I hardly know a soul here except my leading lady and our host."

They were summoned to the supper table. Hillyard found himself with the leading lady on one side of him and Stella Croyle opposite, and Mario Escobar a couple of seats away. Supper was half through when Escobar leaned suddenly forward.

"Mr. Hillyard, I have seen you before, somewhere and not in England."

"That is possible."

"In Spain?"

"Yes," answered Hillyard.

A certain curiosity in Escobar's voice, a certain reticence in Hillyard's, arrested the attention of those about.

"Let me see!" continued Escobar. "It was in the Opera House at Barcelona on the first performance of Manon Lescaut."

"No," replied Hillyard.

"Then—I know—it was under the palm-trees in front of the sea at Alicante one night."

Hillyard nodded.

"That may well have been. I was up and down the south coast of Spain for three years. Eighteen months of it were spent at Alicante."

He turned to his neighbour, but Escobar persisted.

"It was for your health?"

Hillyard did not answer directly.

"My lungs have always been my trouble," he said.

Hardiman bent towards Stella Croyle.

"I think our new friend has had a curious life, Stella. He should interest you."

Stella Croyle replied with a shrewd look towards the Spaniard.

"At present he is interesting Escobar. One would say Escobar was suspicious lest Mr. Hillyard should know too much of him."

Sir Charles laughed.

"The Mario Escobars are always suspicious. Let us see!" he said in a low voice, and leaning across the table, he shot a question sharply at the Spaniard.

"And what were you doing under the palm trees, in front of the sea at Alicante, Señor Escobar?"

Mario Escobar sat back. The challenge had startled him. He reflected, and as the recollection came he turned slowly very white.

"I?" he asked.

"Yes," said Hardiman, leaning forward. But it was not at Hardiman that Escobar was looking. His eyes were fixed warily on Hillyard. He answered the question warily too, fragment by fragment, ready to stop, ready to take the words back, if a sign of recollection kindled in Hillyard's face.

"It is what we should call here the esplanade—the sea and harbour on one side, the houses on the other. The band plays under the palms in front of the Casino on summer nights. I——" and he took the last words at a rush—"I was sitting in a lounge chair in front of the club, when I saw Mr. Hillyard pass. An Englishman is noticeable in Alicante. There are so few of them."

"Yes," Hillyard agreed. No recollection was stirred in him by Escobar's description. Escobar turned away, but he could not quite conceal the relief he felt.

"Yes, my friend," said Hardiman to himself, "you have taken your water-jump too. And you're uncommonly glad that you haven't come a cropper."

After that noticeable moment of tension, the talk swept on into sprightlier channels.

CHAPTER IV

The Secret of Harry Luttrell

"Shall I take you home?"

"Oh, will you?" cried Stella Croyle, with a little burst of pleasure. After all, Hillyard was the great man of the evening, and that he should consider her out of all that company was pleasant. "I will get my cloak."

Throughout the supper-party Hillyard had been at a loss to discover in Stella Croyle the woman whom Hardiman had led him to expect. Her spirits were high, but unforced. She chattered away with more gaiety than wit, like the rest of Hardiman's guests, but the gaiety was apt to the occasion. She had the gift of a clear and musical laugh, and her small delicate face would wrinkle and pout into grimaces which gave to her a rather attractive air of gaminerie—Hillyard could find no word but the French one to express her on that evening. He drove her to a small house in the Bayswater Road, overlooking Kensington Gardens.

"Will you come in for a moment?" she asked.

Hillyard followed her up a paved pathway, through a tiny garden enclosed in a high wall, to her door. She led him into a room bright with flowers and pictures. Curtains of purple brocade were drawn across the window, a fire burned on the hearth, and thick soft cushions on broad couches gave the room a look of comfort.

"You live here alone?" Hillyard asked.

"Yes."

She turned suddenly towards him as he gazed about the room.

"I married a long while ago." She stood in front of him like a slim child. It seemed impossible. "Yes, before I knew anything—to get away from home. Our marriage did not go smoothly. After three years I ran away—oh, not with any one I cared for; he happened to be there, that was all. After a month he deserted me in Italy. I have fortunately some money of my own and a few friends who did not turn me down—Lady Splay, for instance. There!"

She moved to a table and poured out for Hillyard a whisky-and-soda.

"My question was thoughtless," he said. "I did not mean that you should answer it as you did."

"I preferred you to know."

"I am honoured," Hillyard replied.

Stella Croyle sat down upon a low stool in front of the fire. Hillyard sank into one of the deep-cushioned chairs. The day of tension was over, and there was no doubt about the success of "The Dark Tower." Stella Croyle sat very quietly, with the firelight playing upon her face and her delicate dress. Her vivacity had dropped from her like the pretty cloak she had thrown aside. Both became her well, but they were for use out-of-doors, and Hillyard was grateful that she had discarded them.

"You are tired, no doubt," he said, reluctantly. "I ought to go."

"No," she answered. "It is pleasant before the fire here."

"Thank you. I should like to stay for a little while. I did not know until I came into this room with how much anxiety I had been looking forward to this night."

He leaned forward with his hands clenched, and saw pass in the bright coals glimpses of the long tale of days when endeavour was fruitless and hopes were disappointed. "Success! Lord, how I wanted it!" he whispered.

Stella Croyle looked at him with a smile.

"It was sure to come to you, since you wanted it enough," she said.

"Yes, but in time?" exclaimed Hillyard.

"In time for what?"

Hillyard broke into a laugh.

"I don't know," he answered. He was silent for a little while, and the comfort of the room, the quiet of the night, the pleasant sympathy of Stella Croyle, all wrought upon him. "I don't know," he repeated slowly. "I am waiting. But out of my queer life something more has got to come—something more and something different. I have always been sure of it, but I used to be afraid that the opportunity would come while I was still chained to the handles of the barrow."

Hillyard's life, though within a short time its vicissitudes had been many and most divergent, had probably not been as strange as he imagined it to be. He looked back upon it with too intense an interest to be its impartial judge. Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him altogether. At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without tradition.

His father, a partner in a small firm of shipping agents which had not the tradition of a solid, old-fashioned business, had moved in Martin's boyhood from a little semi-detached villa with its flight of front steps in one suburb, to a house in a garden of trees in another. The boy had been sent to a brand new day-school of excessive size, which gathered its pupils into its class-rooms at nine o'clock in the morning and dispersed them to their homes at four. No boy was proud that he went to school at St. Eldred's, or was deterred from any meanness by the thought that it was a breach of the school's traditions. The school meant so many lessons in so many class-rooms, and no more.

Hillyard was the only child. Between himself and his parents there was little sympathy and understanding. He saw them at meals, and fled from the table to his own room, where he read voraciously.

"You never heard of such a jumble of books," he said to Stella Croyle. "Matthew Arnold, Helps, Paradise Lost, Ten Thousand a Year, The Revolt of Islam, Tennyson. I knew the whole of In Memoriam by heart—absolutely every line of it, and pages of Browning. The little brown books! I would walk miles to pick one of them up. My people would find the books lying about the house, and couldn't make head or tail of why I wanted to read them. There were two red-letter days: one when I first bought the two volumes of Herrick, the second when I tumbled upon De Quincey. That's the author to bowl a boy over. The Stage-Coach, the Autobiography, the Confessions—I could never get tired of them. I remember buying an ounce of laudanum at a chemist's on London Bridge and taking it home, with the intention of following in the steps of my hero and qualifying to drink it out of a decanter."

Stella Croyle had swung round from the fireplace, and was listening now with parted lips.

"And did you?" she exclaimed, in a kind of eager suspense.

Hillyard shook his head.

"The taste was too unpleasant. I drank about half an ounce and threw the rest away. I was saved from that folly."

Stella Croyle turned again to the fire.

"Yes," she said rather listlessly.

Yet Hillyard might almost have become a consumer of drugs, such queer and wayward fancies took him in charge. It became a fine thing to him to stay up all night just for the sake of staying up, and many a night he passed at his open window, even in winter time, doing nothing, not even dreaming, simply waiting for the day to break. It seemed to him soft and wrong that a man should take his clothes off and lie comfortably between sheets. And then came another twist. When all the house was quiet, he would slip out of a ground-floor window and roam for hours about the lonely roads, a solitary boy revelling even then in the extraordinary conduct of his life. There was in the neighbourhood a footpath through a thick grove of trees which ran up a long, high hill, and, midway in the ascent, crossed a railway cutting by a rustic bridge.

"That was my favourite walk, though I always entered by the swing-gate in fear, and trembled at every movement of the branches, and continually expected an attack. I would hang over that railway bridge, especially on moonlit nights, and compose poems and thoughts—you know—great, short thoughts." Hillyard laughed. "I was going to be a poet, you understand—a clear, full voice such as had seldom been heard; my poems were all about the moon sailing in the Empyrean and Death. Death was my strong suit. I sent some of my poems to the local Press, signed 'Lethe,' but I could never hear that they were published."

Stella Croyle laughed, and Hillyard went on. "From the top of the hill I would strike off to the west, and see the morning break over London. In summer that was wonderful! The Houses of Parliament. St Paul's like a silver bubble rising out of the mist, then, as the mist cleared over the river, a London clean and all silver in the morning light! I was going to conquer all that, you know—I—

"'Silent upon a peak of Peckham Rye.'"

"I wonder you didn't kill yourself," cried Stella.

"I very nearly did," answered Hillyard.

"Didn't your parents interfere?"

"No. They never knew of my wanderings. They did know, of course, that I used not to go to bed. But they left me alone. I was a bitter disappointment in every way. They wanted a reasonable son, who would go into the agency business, and they had instead—me. I should think that I was pretty odious, too, and we were all of passionate tempers. Besides, with all this reading, I didn't do particularly well at school. How could I when day after day I would march off from the house, leaving a smooth bed behind me in my room? We were thorny people. Quarrels were frequent. My mother had a phrase which set my teeth on edge—'Don't you talk, Martin, until you are earning your living'—the sort of remark that stings and stays in a boy's memory as something unfair. There was a great row in the end, one night at ten o'clock, when I was sixteen, and I left the house and tramped into London."

"What in the world did you do?" cried Stella.

"I shipped as a boy on a fruit-tramp for Valencia in Spain. And I believe that saved my life. For my lungs were beginning to be troublesome."

The fruit-tramp had not been out more than two days when the fo'c'sle hands selected the lad, since he had some education, to be their spokesman on a deputation to the captain. Martin Hillyard went aft with the men and put their case for better food and less violence. He was not therefore popular with the old man, and at Valencia he thought it prudent to desert.

Stella Croyle had turned towards him again. There was a vividness in his manner, an enjoyment, too, which laid hold upon her. It was curious to her to realise that this man talking to her here in the Bayswater Road, had been so lately a ragged youth scouting for his living on the quays of Southern Spain.

"You were at that place—Alicante!" she cried.

"Part of the time."

"And there Mario Escobar saw you. I wonder why he was frightened lest you too should have seen him," she added slowly.

"Was he?"

"Yes. He was sitting on the same side of the table as you, so you wouldn't have noticed. But he was opposite to me; and he was afraid."

Hillyard was puzzled.

"I can't think of a reason. I was a shipping clerk of no importance. I can't remember that I ever came across his name in all the eighteen months I spent in Alicante."

When Martin Hillyard was nineteen, Death intervened in the family feud. His parents died within a few weeks of each other.

"I was left with a thousand pounds."

"What did you do with them?"

"I went to Oxford."

"You? After those years of independence?"

"It had been my one passionate dream for years."

"The Scholar Gipsy," "Thyrsis," the Preface to the "Essays in Criticism," one or two glimpses of the actual city, its grey spires and towers, caught from the windows of a train, had long ago set the craving in his heart. Oxford had grown dim in unattainable mists, no longer a desire so much as a poignant regret, yet now he actually walked its sacred streets.

"And you enjoyed it?" asked Stella.

"I had the most wondrous time," Hillyard replied fervently. "There was one bad evening, when I realised that I couldn't write poetry. After that I cut my hair and joined the Wine Club. I stroked the Torpid and rowed three in my College Eight. I had friends for the first time. One above all"

He stopped over-abruptly. Stella Croyle had the impression of a careless sentinel suddenly waked, suddenly standing to attention at the door of a treasure-house of memories. She was challenged. Very well. It was her humour to take the challenge up just to prove to herself that she could slip past a man's guard if the spirit moved her. She turned on Hillyard a pair of most friendly sympathetic eyes.

"Tell me of your friend."

"Oh, there's not much to tell. He rowed in the same boat with me. He had just what I had not—traditions. From his small old brown manor-house in a western county to his very choice of a career, he was wrapped about in tradition. He went into the army. He had to go."

"What is his name?"

Stella Croyle interrupted him. She was not looking at him any more. She was staring into the fire, and her body was very still. But there was excitement in her voice.

"Harry Luttrell," replied Hillyard, and Stella Croyle did not move. "I don't know what has become of him. You see, I had ninety pounds left out of the thousand when I left Oxford. So I just dived."

"But you have come up again now. You will resume your friends at the point where you dived."

"Not yet. I am going away in a week's time."

"For long?"

"Eight months."

"And far?"

"Very."

"I am sorry," said Stella.

It had been the intention of Hillyard to use his first months of real freedom in a great wandering amongst wide spaces. The journey had been long since planned, even details of camp outfit and equipment and the calibre of rifles considered.

"I have been at my preparations for years," he said. "I lived in a cubbyhole in Westminster, writing and writing and writing, but when I thought of this journey to be, certain to be, the walls would dissolve, and I would walk in magical places under the sun."

Stella Croyle quoted the verses gaily, and Hillyard, lost in the anticipation of his journey, never noticed that the gaiety rang false.

"And where are you going?" she asked.

"To the Sudan."

It seemed that Stella expected just that answer and no other. She gazed into the fire without moving, seeking to piece together a picture in the coals of that unknown country which held all for which she yearned.

"I shall travel slowly up the White Nile to Renk," Hillyard continued, blissfully. He was delighted at the interest which Mrs. Croyle was taking in his itinerary. She was clearly a superior person. "From Renk, I shall cross to the Blue Nile at Rosaires, and travel eastward again to the River Dinder——"

"You are most fortunate," Stella interrupted wistfully.

"Yes, am I not?" cried Hillyard. It looked as if nothing would break through his obtuseness.

"I should love to be going in your place."

"You?"

Hillyard smiled. She was for a mantelshelf in a boudoir, not for a camp.

"Yes—I," and her voice suddenly broke.

Hillyard sprang up from his chair, but Stella held up her hand to check him, and turned her face still further away. Hillyard resumed his seat uncomfortably.

"You may meet your friend Harry Luttrell in the Sudan," she explained. "He is stationed somewhere in that country—where exactly I would give a great deal to know."

They sat without speaking for a little while, Stella once more turning to the fire. Hillyard watching her wistful face and the droop of her shoulders understood at last the truth of Hardiman's description. The mask was lain aside. Here indeed was a Lady of Sorrows.

Stella Croyle was silent until she was quite sure that she had once more the mastery of her voice. It was important to her that her next words should not be forgotten. But even so she did not dare to speak above a whisper.

"I want you to do me a favour. If you should meet Harry, I should like him to have news of me. I should like him also—oh, not so often—but just every now and then to write me a little line."

There were tears glistening on her dark eyelashes. Hillyard fell into a sort of panic as he reflected upon his own vaunting talk. Compared with this woman's poignant distress, all the vicissitudes of his life seemed now quite trivial and small. Here were tears falling and Hillyard was unused to tears. Nor had he ever heard so poignant a longing in any human voice as that on which Stella's prayer to him was breathed. He was ashamed. He was also a little envious of Harry Luttrell. He was also a little angry with Harry Luttrell.

"You won't forget?"

Stella clasped her hands together imploringly.

"No," Hillyard replied. "Be very sure of that, Mrs. Croyle! If I meet Luttrell he shall have your message."

"Thank you."

Stella Croyle dried the tears from her cheeks and stood up.

"I have been foolish. You won't find me like that again," she cried, and she helped Hillyard on with his coat. She went to the door to see him out, but stopped as she grasped the handle.

All Hillyard's talk about himself had passed in at one ear and out at the other. But every word which he had spoken about Harry Luttrell was written on her heart. And one phrase had kindled a tiny spark of hope. She had put it aside by itself, wanting more knowledge about it, and meaning to have that knowledge before Hillyard departed. She put her question now, with the door still closed and her back to it.

"You said that Harry had to join the army. What did you mean by that?"

Hillyard hesitated.

"Did he not tell you himself?"

"No."

Hillyard stood between loyalty to his friend and the recollection of Stella Croyle's tears. If Luttrell had not told her—why then——

"Then I don't well see how I can," he said uncomfortably.

"But I want to know," said Stella, bending her brows at him in astonishment that he should refuse her so small a thing. Then her manner changed. "Oh, I do want to know," she cried, and Hillyard's obstinacy broke down.

Men have the strangest fancies which compel them to do out of all reason, even the things which they hate to do, and to put aside what they hold most dear. Fancies unintelligible to practical people like women—thus Stella Croyle's thoughts ran—but to be taken note of very carefully. High-flown motives from a world of white angels, where no doubt they are very suitable. But men will use them as working motives here below, with the result that they wreck women's hearts and cause themselves a great deal of useless misery.

Stella's hopes and her self-esteem had for long played with the thought that it might possibly be one of those impracticable notions which had whipped Harry Luttrell up to the rupture of their alliance; that after all, it was not that he was tired of a chain. Yes, she wanted to know.

"Luttrell only told me once, only spoke about it once," said Hillyard shifting from one foot to the other. "The week after the eights. We rowed down to Kennington Island in a racing pair, had supper there——"

"Yes, yes," Stella Croyle interrupted. Oh, how dense men could be to be sure! What in the world did it matter, how or when the secret was told?

"I beg your pardon," said Hillyard. "But really it does matter a little. You see, it was on our way back, when it was quite dark, so dark that really you could see little but the line of sky above the trees, and the flash of the water at the end of the stroke. I doubt if Luttrell would have ever told me at all, if it hadn't been for just that one fact, that we were alone together in the darkness and out on the river."

"Yes, I was wrong," said Stella penitently. "I was impatient. I am sorry."

More and more, just because of this detail, she was ready to believe that Harry Luttrell had left her for some reason quite outside themselves, for some other reason than weariness and the swift end of passion.

"Luttrell's father, his grandfather and many others of his name had served in the Clayford Regiment. It was his home regiment and the tradition of the family binding from father to son, was that there should always be Luttrells amongst its officers."

"And for that reason Harry——" Stella interrupted impetuously.

"No, there is more compulsion than that in Harry's case," Hillyard took her up. "Much more! The Clayfords ran in the South African War, and ran badly. They returned to England a disgraced regiment. Now do you see the compulsion?"

Stella Croyle turned the problem over in her mind.

"Yes, I think I do," she said, but still was rather doubtful. Then she looked at the problem through Harry Luttrell's eyes.

"Yes, I understand. The regiment must recover its good name in the next war. It was an obligation of honour on Harry to take his commission in it, to bear his part in the recovery."

"Yes. I told you, didn't I? Harry Luttrell was cradled in tradition."

Hillyard saw Mrs. Croyle's face brighten. Now she had the key to Harry Luttrell. He had joined the Clayfords. And what was his fear at Stockholm? The slovenly soldier! Yes, he had given her the real reason after all during that dinner on the balcony at Hasselbacken. He feared to become the slovenly soldier if he idled longer in England. It was not because he was tired of her, that the separation had come. Thus she reasoned, and she reasoned just in one little respect wrong. She had the real secret without a doubt, that "something else," which Sir Charles Hardiman divined but could not interpret. But she did not understand that Harry Luttrell saw in her, one of the factors, nay the chief of the factors which were converting him into that thing of contempt, the slovenly soldier.

"Thank you," she said to Hillyard with a smile. She stood aside now from the door. "It was kind of you to bring me home and talk with me for a little while."

But it seems that her recovery of spirits did not last out the night. Doubts assailed her—Harry Luttrell was beneath other skies with other preoccupations and no message from him had ever come to her. Even if his love was unchanged at Stockholm, it might not be so now. Hillyard rang her up on the telephone the next morning and warm in his sympathy asked her to lunch with him. But it was a pitiful little voice which replied to him. Stella Croyle answered from her bed. She was not well. She would stay in bed for a day and then go to a little cottage which she owned in the country. She would see Hillyard again next year when he returned from the East.

"Yes, that's her way," said Sir Charles Hardiman. He met Hillyard the day before he sailed for Port Said and questioned him about Stella Croyle discreetly. "She runs to earth when she's unhappy. We shall not see her for a couple of months. No one will."

CHAPTER V

Hillyard's Messenger

Hillyard turned his back upon the pools of the Khor Galagu at the end of April and wandered slowly down the River Dinder. From time to time his shikari would lead his camels and camp-servants out on to an open clearing on the high river bank and announce a name still marked upon the maps. Once there had been a village here, before the Kalifa sent his soldiers and herded the tribes into the towns for his better security. Now there was no sign anywhere of habitation. The red boles of the mimosa trees, purple-brown cracked earth, yellow stubble of burnt grass, the skimming of myriads of birds above the tree-tops and shy wild animals gliding noiselessly in the dark of the forest—there was nothing more now. It seemed that no human foot had ever trodden that region.

Hillyard's holiday was coming to an end, for in a month the rainy season would begin and this great park become a marsh. He went fluctuating between an excited eagerness for a renewal of rivalry and the interchange of ideas and the companionship of women; and a reluctance to leave a country which had so restored him to physical well-being. Never had he been so strong. He had recaptured, after his five years of London confinement, the swift spring of the muscles, the immediate response of the body to the demand made upon it, and the glorious cessation of fatigue when after arduous hours of heat and exertion he stretched himself upon his camp-chair in the shadow of his tent. On the whole he travelled northwards reluctantly; until he came to a little open space ten days away from the first village he would touch.

He camped there just before noon, and at three o'clock on the following morning, in the company of his shikari, his skinner and his donkey-boy he was riding along a narrow path high above the river. It was very dark, so that even with the vast blaze of stars overhead, Hillyard could hardly see the flutter of his shikari's white robe a few paces ahead of him. They passed a clump of bushes and immediately afterwards heard a great shuffling and lapping of water below them. The shikari stopped abruptly and seized the bridle of Hillyard's donkey. The night was so still that the noise at the water's edge below seemed to fill the world. Hillyard slipped off the back of his donkey and took his rifle from his boy.

"Gamus!" whispered the shikari.

Hillyard almost swore aloud. There was a creek, three hours' march away, where the reed buck came down to drink in the morning. For that creek Hillyard was now making with a little Mannlicher sporting rifle—and he had tumbled suddenly upon buffalo! He was on the very edge of the buffalo country, he would see no more between here and the houses of Senga.

It was his last chance and he had nothing but a popgun! He was still reproaching himself when a small but startling change took place. The snuffling and lapping suddenly ceased; and with the cessation of all sound, the night became sinister.

The shikari whispered again.

"Now they in their turn know that we are here." He enveloped the donkey's head in a shawl that he was carrying. "Do not move," he continued. "They are listening."

Shikari, skinner, donkey-boy, donkey and Hillyard stood together, motionless, silent. Hillyard had come out to hunt. Down below the herd in its dumb parliament was debating whether he should be the hunted. There was little chance for any one of them if the debate went against them. Hillyard might bring down one—perhaps two, if by some miraculous chance he shot a bullet through both forelegs. But it would make no difference to the herd. Hillyard pictured them below by the water's edge, their heads lifted, their tails stiffened, waiting in the darkness. Once the lone, earth-shaking roar of a lion spread from far away, booming over the dark country. But the herd below never stirred. It no more feared the lion than it feared the four men on the river bank above. An hour passed before at last the river water plashed under the trampling hoofs.

Hillyard threw his rifle forward, but the shikari touched him on the arm.

"They are going," he whispered, and again the four men waited, until the shikari raised his hand.

"It will be good for us to move! They are very near." He looked towards the east, but there was no sign yet of the dawn.

"We will go very cautiously into the forest. We shall not know where they are, but they will know everything we are doing."

In single file they moved from the bank amongst the mimosas, the donkey with his head covered, still led by the boy. Under the cavern of the branches it was black as pitch—so black that Hillyard did not see the hand which the shikari quietly laid upon his shoulder.

"Listen."

On his left a branch snapped, ahead of them a bush that had been bent aside swished back on its release.

"They are moving with us. They are all round us," the shikari whispered. "They know everything we do. Let us wait here. When the morning breaks they will charge or they will go."

So once again the little party came to a halt. Hillyard stood listening and wondering if the morning would ever come; and even in that time of tension the habit of his mind reasserted its sway. This long, silent waiting for the dawn in the depths of an African forest with death at his very elbow—here was another sharp event of life in vivid contrast with all the others which had gone before. The years in London, the letter-box opposite the Abbey where he had posted his manuscripts at three in the morning and bought a cup of coffee at the stall by the kerb—times so very close to him—the terms at Oxford, the strange hungry days on the quays of Spain, the moonlit wanderings on the footpath over the rustic ridge and up the hill, when he composed poems to the moon and pithy short, great thoughts—here was something fresh to add to them if he didn't go down at daybreak under the hoofs of the herd! Here was yet a further token, that out of the vicissitudes of his life something more, something new, something altogether different and unimagined was to come, as the crown and ultimate reason of all that had gone before. Once more the shikari's hand touched him and pointed eastwards. The tree-trunks were emerging from the darkness. Beyond them the black cup of the sky was thinning to translucency. Very quickly the grey light widened beyond this vast palisade of trees. Even in here below the high branches, it began to steal vaporous and dim. About them on every side now the buffalo were moving. The shikari's grip tightened on Hillyard's arm. The moment of danger had come. It would be the smash of his breast-bone against the forehead of the beast, hoofs and knees kneading his broken body and the thrust and lunge of the short curled horns until long after he was dead, or—the new test and preparation to add to those which had gone before!

Suddenly the shikari cried aloud.

"They are off"; and while he spoke came a loud snapping of boughs, the sound of heavy bodies crashing against trees and for a moment against the grey light in that cathedral of a forest the huge carcases of the buffalo in mad flight were dimly visible. Then silence came again for a few moments, till the boughs above them shrilled with birds and the morning in a splendour of gold and scarlet, like a roar of trumpets stormed the stars.

Hillyard drew a breath.

"Let us go on," he said.

They advanced perhaps fifty yards before the second miracle of that morning smote upon his eyes. A solitary Arab, driving a tiny, overladen donkey, was advancing towards him, his white robes flickering in and out among the tree-boles.

Hillyard looked at his shikari. But the shikari neither spoke nor altered the regularity of his face. Hillyard put no question in consequence. The Arab was ten days' journey from the nearest village and, even so, his back was turned towards it. He was moving from solitude into solitude still more silent and remote. It was impossible. Hillyard's eyes were playing him false.

He shut them for an instant and opened them again, thinking that the vision would have gone. But there was the Arab still nearer to them and moving with a swift agility. A ray of sunlight struck through the branches of a tree and burned suddenly like a dancing flame on something the man carried—a carbine with a brass hammer. And the next moment a sound proved beyond all doubt to Hillyard that his eyes did not deceive him. For he heard the slapping of the Arab's loose slippers upon the hard-caked earth.

Oh yes, the man was real enough. For the shikari suddenly swerved from the head of the file towards the stranger and stopped. The two men talked together and meanwhile Hillyard and the rest of his party halted. Hillyard lit his pipe.

"Who is it, Hamet?" he cried, and the shikari turned with his companion and came back.

"It is the postman," he said as though the delivery of letters along the Dinder River were the most commonplace of events.

"The postman!" cried Hillyard. "What in the world do you mean?"

"Yes," Hamet explained. "He carries letters between Abyssinia and Senga on the Blue Nile. He is now on his way back to Abyssinia."

"But how long does it take him?" Hillyard asked in amazement.

"He goes and returns once a year. The journey takes him four months each way unless he meets with a party shooting. Then it takes longer for he goes with the party to get meat."

Hillyard stared at the Arab in amazement. He was a lean slip of a man, almost as black as a negro, with his hair running back above the temples, and legs like walking-sticks. He stood wreathed in smiles and nodding confirmation of Hamet's words. But to Hillyard, with the emotions of the dark hour just past still shivering about him, he seemed something out of nature. Hillyard leaned from his donkey and took the carbine from the postman's hand. It was an ancient thing of Spanish manufacture, heavy as a pig of lead.

"But this can't be of any use," he cried. "Is the man never attacked?"

Hamet talked with the Arab in a dialect Hillyard did not understand at all; and interpreted the conversation.

"No. He has only once fired his rifle. One night—oh, a long way farther to the south—he waked up to see an elephant fighting his little donkey in the moonlight and he fired his rifle and the elephant ran away. You must know that all these little Korans he carries on his arms and round his neck have been specially blessed by a most holy man."

The postman's shoulders, elbows, wrists and neck were circled about by chaplets on which little wooden Korans were strung. He fingered them and counted them, smiling like a woman displaying her jewels to her less fortunate friends.

"So he is safe," continued Hamet. "Yes, he will even have his picture taken. Yes, he can afford to suffer that. He will stand in front of the great eye and the machine shall go click, and it will not do him any harm at all. He has a letter for you." Hamet dropped from his enthusiasm over the wonderful immunity of the postman from the dangers of photography into a most matter-of-fact voice.

"A letter for me? That's impossible," cried Hillyard.

But the Arab was thrusting his hand here and there in the load on the donkey's back and finally drew out a goatskin bag. Hillyard, like other Englishmen, had been brought up in a creed which included the inefficiency of all Postmasters-general. A blight fell upon such persons, withering their qualities and shrivelling them into the meanest caricatures of bureaucrats. It could not be that the postal service was now to reveal resource and become the servant of romance. Yet the Arab drew forth a sealed envelope and handed it to Hillyard. And it bore the inscription of his name.

Oh, but it bore much more than that! It was written in a hand which Hillyard had not seen for seven years, and the mere sight of it swept him back in a glory of recollections to Oxford, its towers and tall roofs, which mean so much more to the man who has gone down than to the youth who is up. The forest, with its patterns of golden sunlight and its colonnades of trees crowding away into darkness, was less visible than those towers to Hillyard, as he stood with the envelope in his hand. Once more he swung down the High and across the Broad from a lecture with a ragged gown across his arm. Merton and the House, New College and Magdalen Tower—he saw the enchanted city across Christ Church meadows from the river, he looked down upon it from Headington, and again from those high fields where, at twilight, the scholar-gipsy used to roam. For the letter was in the hand of Harry Luttrell.

He tore it open and read:

"Some one in London is asking for you. Who it is I don't know. But the message came through in a secret cipher and it might be important. I think you should pack your affs. and hurry along to Senga, where I shall expect you."

Martin Hillyard folded the letter and put it away in his pocket.

"He will find food in our camp," he said to Hamet, with a nod towards the postman. "We may as well go on."

Even if he returned to camp at once, it would be too late to start that day. The sun would be high long before the baggage could be packed upon the camels. The little party went on to the creek and built a tiny house of reeds and boughs, in which Hillyard sat down to wait for the deer to gather. He had one of the green volumes of "The Vicomte de Bragelonne" in his pocket, but this morning the splendid Four for once did not enchain him. Who was it in London who wanted him—wanted him so much that cipher telegrams must find him out on the banks of the Dinder River? Was this letter the summons to the something more and something different? Was the postman to Abyssinia the expected messenger? The miracle of that morning predisposed him to think so.

He sat thus for an hour, and then stepping daintily, with timid eyes alert, a tall reed-buck and his doe came through the glade towards the water. But they did not drink; they waited, cropping the grass. Gradually, through a long hour, others gathered, tawny and yellow, and dappled-brown, and stood and fed until—perhaps a signal was given, perhaps a known moment had come—all like soldiers at a command, moved down to the water's edge.

Six nights later Hillyard camped at Lueisa, near to that big tree under which it is not wise to spread your bed. He took his bath at ten o'clock at night under the moon, and the water from the river was hot. He stretched himself out in his bed and waked again that night after the moon had set, to fix indelibly in his memory the blazing dome of stars above his head, and the Southern Cross burning in a corner of the sky. The long, wonderful holiday was ended. To-morrow night he would sleep in a house. Would he ever come this way again?

In the dark of the morning he struck westwards from the Dinder, across a most tedious neck of land, for Senga and the Blue Nile.

CHAPTER VI

The Honorary Member

At six o'clock in the evening Colin Rayne, a young civilian in the Sudan Service, heard, as he sat on the balcony of the mess at Senga, the rhythmical thud of camels swinging in to their rest in the freshness of the night air.

"There's our man," he exclaimed, and running downstairs, he reached the door just as Hillyard's twelve camels and his donkeys trooped into the light. Hillyard was riding bareheaded, with his helmet looped to his saddle, a young man, worn thin by sun and exercise, with fair burnt hair, and a brown clean shaven face. Colin Rayne went up to him as he dismounted.

"Captain Luttrell asked me to look after you. He has got some work on hand for the moment. We'll see after your affs."

"Thank you."

"You might show me, by the way, where your cartridges are."

Hillyard selected the camel on which they were packed and Rayne called a Sudanese sergeant to take them into the mess.

"Now we will go upstairs. I expect that you can do with a whisky-and-soda," he said.

Hillyard was presented to a Doctor Mayle, who was conducting a special research into the cause of an obscure fever; and to the other officers of this headquarters of a Province. They were all young, Hillyard himself was older than any of them.

"Oh, we have got some married ones, too," said Rayne, "but they live in houses of their own like gentlefolk."

"There are some Englishwomen here then?" said Hillyard, and for an appreciable moment there was silence. Then a shortish, square man, with a heavy moustache explained, if explanation it could be called.

"No. They were sent off to Senaar this morning—to be out of the way. Wiser."

Hillyard asked no questions but drank his whisky-and-soda.

"I haven't seen Luttrell since we were at Oxford together," he said.

"And it's by an accident that you see him now," said Rayne. "The Governor of Senga was thrown from his horse and killed on the spot down by the bridge there six weeks ago. The road gave way suddenly under his horse's hoofs. Some one was wanted here immediately."

"Yes, there's no doubt of that," said Mr. Blacker, the short square man, with emphasis.

"Captain Luttrell had done very well in Kordofan," Rayne resumed. "He was fetched up here in a hurry as Acting-Governor. But no doubt the appointment will be confirmed."

Mr. Blacker added another croak.

"Oh, it'll be confirmed all right, if——" and he left his sentence in the air; but his gesture finished it.

"If there is any Luttrell left to confirm," Martin Hillyard interpreted, though he kept his interpretation to himself.

There certainly was in that room with the big balcony a grim expectation of trouble. It was apparent, not so much in words as in an attention to distant noises, and a kind of strained silence. The sound of a second caravan was heard. It was coming from the north. Rayne ran to the rail of the balcony and looked anxiously out. The street here was very broad and the huts upon the opposite side already dark except at one point, where an unshaded kerosene lamp cast through on open door a panel of glaring light upon the darkness. Rayne saw the caravan emerge spectrally into the light and disappear again.

"They are our beasts," he said in a voice of relief, and a minute later he called down to the soldier in charge. He spoke in the Dinka language and the soldier replied in the same tongue. Hillyard understood enough of it now to learn that the women had arrived safely at Senaar without any incident or annoyance.

"That's good," said Colin Rayne. He turned to Hillyard. "Luttrell's a long time. Shall we go and find him?"

Both Blacker and Dr. Mayle looked up with surprise, but Hillyard had risen quickly, and they raised no objection. Rayne walked down the stairs first and led the way towards the rear of the building across an open stretch of ground. The moon had not yet risen, and it was pitch dark so that Hillyard had not an idea whither he was being led. Colin Rayne stopped at a small, low door in a high big wall and knocked. A heavy key grated in a lock and the door was opened by a soldier. Hillyard found himself standing inside a big compound, in the midst of which stood some bulky, whitish erection, from which a light gleamed.

Colin Rayne led the way towards the light. It was shining through the doorway of a chamber of new wood planks with a flat roof and some strange, dimly-seen superstructure. Hillyard looked through the doorway and saw a curious scene. Two Sudanese soldiers were present, one of whom carried the lantern. The other, a gigantic creature with a skin like polished mahogany, was stripped to the waist and held poised in his hands a huge wooden mallet with a long handle. He stood measuring his distance from the stem of a young tree which was wedged tightly between a small square of stone on the ground and the flat roof above. Standing apart, and watching everything with quiet eyes was Harry Luttrell.

Even at this first glance in the wavering light of the lantern Hillyard realised that a change had come in the aspect of his friend. It was not a look of age, but authority clothed him as with a garment. Rayne and Hillyard passed into the chamber. Luttrell turned his head and welcomed Hillyard with a smile. But he did not move and immediately afterwards he raised his face to the roof.

"Are you ready up there?"

An English voice replied through the planks.

"Yes, sir," and immediately afterwards a dull and heavy weight like a full sack was dumped upon the platform above their heads.

"Good!"

Luttrell turned towards the giant.

"Are you ready? And you know the signal?"

The Sudanese soldier grinned in delighted anticipation, with a flash of big white teeth, and took a firmer grip of his mallet and swung it over his shoulder.

"Good. Now pay attention," said Luttrell, "so that all may be well and seemly done."

The Sudanese fixed his eyes upon Luttrell's foot and Luttrell began to talk, rapidly and rather to himself than to his audience. Hillyard could make neither head nor tail of the strange scene. It was evident that Luttrell was rehearsing a speech, but why? And what had the Sudanese with the mallet to do with it?

A sudden and rapid sequence of events brought the truth home to him with a shock. At a point of his speech Luttrell stamped twice, and the Sudanese soldier swung his mallet with all his force. The head of it struck the great support full and square. The beam jumped from its position, hopped once on its end, and fell with a crash. And from above there mingled with the crash a most horrid clang, for, with the removal of the beam, two trap-doors swung downwards. Hillyard looked up; he saw the stars, and something falling. Instinctively he stepped back and shut his eyes. When he looked again, within the chamber, midway between the floor and roof, two sacks dangling at the end of two ropes spun and jerked—as though they lived.

Rayne had stepped back and stood quivering from head to foot by Hillyard's side; Hillyard himself felt sick. He knew very well now what he was witnessing—the rehearsal of an execution. The Sudanese soldiers were grinning from ear to ear with delight and pride. The one person quite unmoved was Harry Luttrell, whose ingenuity had invented the device.

"Let it be done just so," he said to the soldiers. "I shall not forgive a mistake."

They saluted, and he dismissed them and turned at last to Martin Hillyard.

"It's good to see you again," he said, as he shook hands; and then he looked sharply into Hillyard's face and laughed. "Shook you up a bit, that performance, eh? Well, they bungled things in Khartum a little while ago. I can't afford awkwardness here."

Senga was in the centre of that old Khalifa's tribe which not so many years ago ruled in Omdurman. It was always restless, always on the look-out for a Messiah.

"Messiahs are most unsettling," said Luttrell, "especially when they don't come. The tribe began sharpening its spear-heads a few weeks ago. Then two of them got excited and killed. That's the consequence," and he jerked his head towards the compound, from which the two friends were walking away.

Hillyard was to hear more of the matter an hour later, as they all sat at dinner in the mess-room. There were thousands of the tribe, all in a ferment, and just half a battalion of Sudanese soldiers under Luttrell's command to keep them in order.

"Blacker thinks we ought to have temporised, and that we shall get scuppered," said Luttrell. He was the one light-hearted man at that table, though he was staking his career, his life, and the life of the colony on the correctness of his judgment. Sir Charles Hardiman would never have recognised in the man who now sat at the head of the mess table the young man who had been so torn by this and that discrimination in the cabin of his yacht at Stockholm. There was something of the joyous savage about him now—a type which England was to discover shortly in some strength amongst the young men who were to officer its armies.

"I don't agree. I have invited the chiefs to see justice done. I am going to pitch them a speech myself from the scaffold—cautionary tales for children, don't you know—and then, if old Fee-Fo-Fum with the mallet don't get too excited and miss his stroke, everything will go like clockwork."

Hillyard wondered how in the world he was going to deliver Stella Croyle's message—a flimsy thing of delicate sentimentality—to this man concerned with life and death, and discharging his responsibilities according to the just rules of his race, without fear and without too much self-questioning. Indeed, the Luttrell, Acting-Governor of Senga, was a more familiar figure to Hillyard than he would have been to Stella Croyle. For he had shaken off, under the pressure of immediate work and immediate decisions, the thin and subtle emotions which were having their way with him two years before. He had recaptured the high spirit of Oxford days, and was lit along his path by that clear flame.

But there were tact and discretion too, as Hillyard was to learn. For Mr. Blacker still croaked at the other end of the table.

"It's right and just and all that of course. But you are taking too high a risk, Luttrell."

The very silence at the table made it clear to Hillyard that Luttrell stood alone in his judgment. But Luttrell only smiled and said:

"Well, old man, since I disagree, the only course is to refer the whole problem to our honorary member."

And at once every countenance lightened, and merriment began to flick and dance from one to other of that company like the beads on the surface of champagne. Only Hillyard was mystified.

"Your honorary member!" he inquired.

Luttrell nodded solemnly, and raised his glass.

"Gentlemen, the Honorary Member of the Senga Mess—Sir Chichester Splay."

The toast was drunk with enthusiasm by all but Hillyard, who sat staring about him and wondering what in the world the Mecænas of the First Nights had in common with these youthful administrators far-flung to the Equator.

"You don't drink, Martin," cried Luttrell. A Socialist at a Public Dinner who refused to honour the Royal Toast could only have scandalised the chairman by a few degrees more than Hillyard's indifference did now.

"I beg your pardon," said Hillyard with humility. "I repair my error now. It was due to amazement."

"Amazement!" Colin Rayne repeated, as Hillyard drained his glass.

"Yes. For I know the man."

There was the silence that follows some stupendous happening; eyes were riveted upon Hillyard in admiration; and then the silence burst.

"He knows him!"

"It's incredible!"

"Actually knows him!"

And suddenly above the din Blacker's voice rose warningly.

"Don't let's lose our heads! That's the great thing! Let us keep as calm as we can and think out our questions very carefully lest the Heaven-sent Bearer of Great Tidings should depart without revealing all he knows."

Chairs were hitched a little closer about Hillyard. The care which had brooded in that room was quite dispelled.

"Have some more port, sir," said the youngest of that gathering, eagerly pushing across the bottle. Hillyard filled his glass. Port was his, and prestige too. He might write a successful play. That was all very well. He might go shooting for eight months along by the two Niles and the Dinder. That was all very well too. He was welcome at the Senga Mess. But he knew Sir Chichester Splay! He acquired in an instant the importance of a prodigy.

"But, since he is an honorary member of your mess, you must know him too," cried Hillyard. "He must have come this way."

"My dear Martin!" Luttrell expostulated, as one upbraiding a child. "Sir Chichester Splay out of London! The thing's inconceivable!"

"Inconceivable! Why, he lives in the country."

A moment of consternation stilled all voices. Then the Doctor spoke in a whisper.

"Is it possible that we are all wrong?"

"He lives at Rackham Park, in Sussex."

Mr. Blacker fell back in relief.

"I know the house. He is a new resident. It is near to Chichester. He went there on the Homœopathic principle."

The conjecture was actually true. Sir Chichester Splay, spurred by his ambition to be a country gentleman with a foot in town, had chosen the neighbourhood on account of his name, so that it might come to be believed that he had a territorial connection.

"Describe him to us," they all cried, and, when Hillyard had finished:

"Well, he might be like that," Luttrell conceded. "It was not our idea."

"No," said Colin Rayne. "You will remember I always differed from all of you, but it seems that I am wrong too. I pictured him as a tall, melancholy man, with a conical bald head and with a habit of plucking at a black straggling beard—something like the portraits of Tennyson."

"To me," said Luttrell, "he was always fat and fussy, with white spats."

"But why are you interested in him at all?" cried Hillyard.

"We will explain the affair to you on the balcony," answered Luttrell, as he rose.

They moved into the dark and coolness of this spacious place, and, stretching themselves in comfort on the long cane chairs, they explained to Hillyard this great mystery. Rayne began the tale.

"You see, we don't get a mail here so very often. Consequently we pay attention when it comes. We read the Searchlight, for instance, with care."

Mr. Blacker snatched the narrative away at this point.

"And Sir Chichester Splay occurs in most issues and in many columns. At first we merely noticed him. Some one would say, 'Oh, here's old Splay again,' as if—it seems incredible now—the matter was of no importance. It needed Luttrell to discover the real significance of Sir Chichester, the man's unique and astounding quality."

Harry Luttrell interrupted now.

"Yes, it was I," he said with pride. "Sir Chichester one day was seen at a Flower Show in Chelsea. On another he attended the first performance of a play. On a third day he honoured the Private View of an Exhibition of Pictures. On a fourth he sat amongst the Distinguished Strangers in the Gallery of the House of Commons. But that was all! This is what I alone perceived. Always that was all!"

Luttrell leaned back and relit his cigar.

"When other people come to be mentioned in the newspapers day after day, sooner or later some information about them slips out, some characteristic thing. If you don't get to know their appearance, you learn at all events their professions, their opinions. But of Sir Chichester Splay—never anything at all. Yet he is there always, nothing can happen without his presence, a man without a shadow, a being without a history. To me, a simple soldier, he is admirable beyond words. For he has achieved the inconceivable. He combines absolute privacy of life with a world-wide notoriety. He may be a stamp-collector. Do I know that? No. All I know is that if there were an Exhibition of Stamp Collections, he would be the first to pass the door." Luttrell rose from his chair.

"Therefore," he added in conclusion, "Sir Chichester is of great value to us at Senga. We elected him to the mess with every formality, and some day, when we have leisure, we shall send a deputation up the Nile to shoot a Mrs. Grey's Antelope to decorate Rackham Park." He turned to Hillyard. "We have a few yards to walk, and it is time."

The two friends walked down the stairs and turned along the road, Hillyard still debating what was, after all, the value of Sir Chichester Splay to the Senga mess. It had seemed to him that Luttrell had not wished for further questions on the balcony, but, now that the two were alone, he asked:

"I don't see it," he said; and Luttrell stopped abruptly and turned to him.

"Don't you, Martin?" he asked gently. All the merriment had gone from his face and voice. "If you were with us for a week you would. It's just the value of a little familiar joke always on tap. Here are a handful of us. We eat together, morning, noon, and night; we work together; we play polo together—we can never get away from each other. And in consequence we get on each other's nerves, especially in the months of hot weather. Ill-temper comes to the top. We quarrel. Irreparable things might be said. That's where Sir Chichester Splay comes in. When the quarrel's getting bitter, we refer it to his arbitration. And, since he has no opinions, we laugh and are saved." Luttrell resumed his walk to the Governor's house.

"Yes, I see now," said Hillyard.

"You had an instance to-night," Luttrell added, as they went in at the door. "It's a serious matter—the order of a Province and a great many lives, and the cost of troops from Khartum, and the careers of all of us are at stake. I think that I am right, and it is for me to say. They disagree. Yes, Sir Chichester Splay saved us to-night, and"—a smile suddenly broke upon his serious face—"I really should like to meet him."

"I will arrange it when we are both in London," Hillyard returned.

He did not forget that promise. But he was often afterwards to recall this moment when he made it—the silent hall, the door open upon the hot, still night, the moon just beginning to gild the dark sky, and the two men standing together, neither with a suspicion of the life-long consequences which were to spring from the casual suggestion and the careless assent.

"You are over there," said Luttrell, pointing to the other side of the hall. He turned towards his own quarters, but a question from Hillyard arrested him.

"What about that message for me?"

"I know nothing about it," Luttrell answered, "beyond what I wrote. The telegram came from Khartum. No doubt they can tell you more at Government House. Good night!"

CHAPTER VII

In the Garden of Eden

Just outside Senga to the north, in open country, stands a great walled zareba, and the space enclosed is the nearest approach to the Garden of Eden which this wicked world can produce. The Zoological Gardens of Cairo and Khartum replenish their cages from Senga. But there are no cages at Senga, and only the honey-badger lives in a tub with a chain round his neck, like a bull-dog. The buffalo and the elephant, the wart-hog and the reed-buck, roam and feed and sleep together. Nor do they trouble, after three days' residence in that pleasant sanctuary, about man—except that specimen of man who brings them food.

All day long you may see, towering above the wall close to the little wooden door, the long necks and slim heads of giraffes looking towards the city and wondering what in the world is the matter with the men to-day, and why they don't come along with the buns and sugar. Once within the zareba, once you have pushed your way between the giraffes and got their noses out of your jacket-pockets, you have really only to be wary of the ostrich. He, mincing delicately around you with his little wicked red eye blinking like a camera shutter, may try with an ill-assumed air of indifference to slip up unnoticed close behind you. If he succeeds he will land you one. And one is enough.

Into this zareba Harry Luttrell led Martin Hillyard on the next morning. Luttrell had an hour free, and the zareba was the one spectacle in Senga. He kicked the honey-badger's tub in his little reed-house and brought out that angry animal to the length of his strong chain and to within an inch of his own calves.

"Charming little beast, isn't he? See the buffalo in the middle? The little elephant came in a week ago from just south of the Khor Galagu. You had something private to say to me? Now's your time. Mind the ostrich, that's all. He looks a little ruffled."

They were quite alone in the zareba. The giraffes had fallen in behind and were following them, and level with them, on Hillyard's side, the ostrich stepped like a delicate lady in a muddy street. Hillyard found it a little difficult to concentrate his thoughts on Stella Croyle's message. But he would have delivered it awkwardly in any case. He had seen enough of Harry Luttrell last night to understand that an ocean now rolled between those two.

"On the first night of my play, 'The Dark Tower,'" he began, and suddenly faced around as the ostrich fell back.

"Yes!" said Luttrell, and he eyed the ostrich indifferently. "That animal's a brute, isn't he?"

He took a threatening step towards it, and the ostrich sidled away as if it really didn't matter to him where he took his morning walk.

"Yes?" Luttrell repeated.

"I went to a supper-party given by Sir Charles Hardiman."

"Oh?"

Luttrell's voice was careless enough. But his eyes went watchfully to Hillyard's face, and he seemed to shut suddenly all expression out of his own.

"Hardiman introduced me to a friend of yours."

Luttrell nodded.

"Mrs. Croyle?"

"Yes."

"She was well?"

"In health, yes!"

"I am very glad." Unexpectedly some feeling of relief had made itself audible in Luttrell's voice. "It would have troubled me if you had brought me any other news of her. Yes, that would have troubled me very much. I should not have been able to forget it," he said slowly.

"But she is unhappy."

Luttrell walked on in silence. His forehead contracted, a look of trouble came into his face. Yet he had an eye all the while for the movements of the animals in the zareba. At last he halted, struck out at the ostrich with his stick, and turned to Hillyard with a gesture of helplessness.

"But what can one do—except the single thing one can't do?"

"She gave me a message, if I should chance to meet you," answered Hillyard.

Luttrell's face hardened perceptibly.

"Let me hear it, Martin."

"She said that she would like you to have news of her, and that from time to time she would like to have a little line from you."

"That was all?"

"Yes."

Harry Luttrell nodded, but he made no reply. He walked back with Hillyard to the door of the zareba, and the ostrich bore them company, now on this side, now on that. The elephant was rolling in the grass like a dog, the giraffes crowded about the little door like beggars outside a restaurant. The two friends walked back towards the town in an air shimmering with heat. The Blue Nile glittered amongst its sand-banks like so many ribands of molten steel. They were close upon the house before Luttrell answered Stella Croyle's message.

"All that," he cried, with a sharp gesture as of a man sweeping something behind him, "all that happened in another age when I was another man."

The gesture was violent, but the words were pitiful. He was not a man exasperated by a woman's unseasonable importunity, but angry with the grim, hard, cruel facts of life.

"It's no good, Martin," he added, with a smile. "Not all the king's horses nor all the king's men——"

Hillyard was sure now that no little line would ever go from Senga to the house in the Bayswater Road. The traditions of his house and of his regiment had Harry Luttrell in their keeping. Messages? Martin Hillyard might expect them, might indeed respond to and obey them, and with advantage, just because they came out of the blue. But the men of tradition, no! The messenger had knocked upon the doors of their fathers' houses before ever they were born.

At the door of the Governor's house Harry Luttrell stopped.

"I expect you'll want to do some marketing, and I shall be busy, and to-night we shall have the others with us. So I'll say now," and his face brightened with a smile, as though here at all events were a matter where the bitter laws of change could work no cruelties, "it has been really good to see you again."

Certain excellent memories were busy with them both—Nuneham and Sanford Lasher and the Cherwell under its overhanging branches. Then Luttrell looked out across to the Blue Nile and those old wondrous days faded from his vision.

"I should like you to get away bukra, bukra, Martin," he said. "Half-past one at the latest, to-morrow morning. Can you manage it?"

"Why, of course," answered Hillyard in surprise.

"You see, I postponed that execution, whilst you were here. I think it'll go off all right, but since it's no concern of yours, I would just as soon you were out of the way. I have fixed it for eight. If you start at half-past one you will be a good many miles away by then."

He turned and went into the house and to his own work. Martin Hillyard walked down the road along the river bank to the town. Harry Luttrell had said his last word concerning Stella Croyle. Of that he was sure and was glad, though Stella's tear-stained face would rise up between his eyes and the water of the Nile. Sooner or later Harry Luttrell would come home, bearing his sheaves, and then he would marry amongst his own people; and a new generation of Luttrells would hold their commissions in the Clayfords. He had said his last word concerning Stella Croyle.

But Hillyard was wrong. For in the dark of the morning, when he had bestridden his donkey and given the order for his caravan to march, he was hailed by Luttrell's voice. He stopped, and Luttrell came down in his pyjamas from the door of the house to him.

"Good luck," he said, and he patted the donkey's neck. "Good luck, old man. We'll meet in England some time."

"Yes," said Hillyard.

It was not to speak these words that Harry Luttrell had risen, after wishing him good-bye the night before. So he waited.

Luttrell was still, his hand on the little donkey's neck.

"You'll remember me to our honorary member, won't you?"

"Yes."

"Don't forget."

"I won't."

Nor was it for this reminder, either. So Hillyard still waited, and at last the words came, jerkily.

"One thing you said yesterday.... I was very glad to hear it. That Stella was well—quite well. You meant that, didn't you? It's the truth?"

"Yes, it's the truth."

"Thank you ... I was a little afraid ... thank you!"

He took his hand from the donkey's neck, and Hillyard rode forward on the long and dreary stage to the one camping ground between Senga and Senaar.

For a little while he wondered at this insistence of Harry Luttrell upon the physical health of Stella Croyle, and why he had been afraid. But when the dawn came his thoughts reverted to his own affairs. The message delivered to him in the forest of the River Dinder! It might mean nothing. It was the part of prudence to make light of his hopes and conjectures. But the hopes would not be stilled, now that he was alone. This was the Summons, the great Summons for which, without his knowledge, the experiences of his life, detail by detail, had builded him.

CHAPTER VIII

Hillyard Hears News of an Old Friend

At Khartum, however, disappointment awaited him. He was received without excitement by a young aide-de-camp at the Palace.

"I heard that you had come in last night. A good trip? Dine with me to-night and you shall show me your heads. The Governor-General's in England."

"There's a telegram."

"Oh yes. It came up to us from Cairo. Some one wanted to know where you were. They'll know about it at Cairo. We just pushed it along, you know," said the aide-de-camp. He dined with Hillyard, admired his heads, arranged for his sleeping compartment, and assured him that the execution had gone off "very nicely" at Senga.

"Luttrell made a palaver, and his patent drop worked as well as anything in Pentonville, and every one went home cheered up and comfortable. Luttrell's a good man."

Thus Hillyard took the train to Wadi Haifa in a chastened mood. Obviously the message was of very little, if indeed of any, importance. A man can hardly swing up to extravagant hopes without dropping to sarcastic self-reproaches on his flightiness and vanity. He was not aware that the young aide-de-camp pushed aside some pressing work to make sure that he did go on the train; or that when the last carriage disappeared towards the great bridge, the aide-de-camp cried, "Well, that's that," like a man who has discharged one task at all events of the many left to his supervision.

One consequence of Hillyard's new humility was that he now loitered on his journey. He stayed a few days at Assouan and yet another few in Luxor, in spite of the heat, and reached Cairo in the beginning of June when the streets were thick with dust-storms and the Government had moved to Alexandria. Hillyard was in two minds whether to go straight home, but in the end he wandered down to the summer seat of government.

If Khartum had been chilly to the enthusiast, Alexandria was chillier. It was civil and polite to Hillyard and made him a member of the Club. But it was concerned with the government of Egypt, and gently allowed Hillyard to perceive it. Khartum had at all events stated "There is a cablegram." At Alexandria the statement became a question: "Is there a cablegram?" In the end a weary and indifferent gentleman unearthed it. He did not show it to Hillyard, but held it in his hand and looked over the top of it and across a roll-top desk at the inquirer.

"Yes, yes. This seems to be what you are asking about. It is for us, you know"—this with a patient smile as Hillyard's impatient hand reached out for it. "Do you know a man called Bendish—Paul Bendish?"

"Bendish?" cried Hillyard. "He was my tutor at Oxford."

"Ah! Then it does clearly refer to you. Bendish has a friend who needs your help in London."

Hillyard stared.

"Do you mean to say that I was sent for from the borders of Abyssinia because Bendish has a friend in London who wants my help?"

The indifferent gentleman stroked his chin.

"It certainly looks like it, doesn't it? But I do hope that you didn't cut your expedition short on that account." He looked remorsefully into Hillyard's face. "In any case, the rainy season was coming on, wasn't it?"

"Yes, my expedition was really ended when the message reached me," Hillyard was forced to admit.

"That's good," said the indifferent gentleman, brightening. "You will see Bendish, of course, in England. By what ship do you sail? It's not very pleasant here, is it?"

"I shall sail on the Himalaya in a week's time."

"Right!" said the official, and he nodded farewell and dipped his nose once more into his papers.

Hillyard walked to the door, conscious that he looked the fool he felt himself to be. But at the door he turned in a sort of exasperation.

"Can't you tell me at all why Bendish's friend wants my help?" he asked.

It was at this moment that the indifferent gentleman had the inspiration of his life.

"I haven't an idea, Mr. Hillyard," he replied. "Perhaps he has got into difficulties in the writing of a revue."

The answer certainly drove Hillyard from the room without another word. He stood outside the door purple with heat and indignation. Hillyard neither overrated nor decried his work. But to be dragged away from the buffalo and the reed-buck of the Dinder River in order to be told that he was a writer of revues. No! That was carrying a bad joke too far.

Hillyard stalked haughtily along the corridor towards the outer door, but not so fast but that a youth passed him with a sheet of paper in his hand. The youth went into the room where Government cablegrams were coded. The sheet of paper which he held in his hand was inscribed with a message that Martin Hillyard would leave Alexandria in a week's time on the s.s. Himalaya. And the message strangely enough was not addressed to Paul Bendish at all. It was headed, "For Commodore Graham. Admiralty." The great Summons had in fact come, although Hillyard knew it not.

He travelled in consequence leisurely by sea. He started from Alexandria after half the month of June had gone, and he was thus in the Bay of Biscay on that historic morning of June the twenty-eighth, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophia Duchess of Hohenberg, were murdered in the streets of Saravejo. London, when he reached it, was a choir of a million voices not yet tuned to the ringing note of one. It was incredible that the storm, foreseen so often over the port wine, should really be bursting at last. Mediation will find a way. Not this time; the moment has been chosen. And what will England do? Ride safe in the calm centre of the hurricane? No ship ever did, and England won't.

A few degenerate ones threw up their hands and cried that all was over—they knew.

Of these a gaunt-visaged man, stubborn and stupid and two generations back a German, held forth in the hall of Hillyard's club.

"German organisation, German thoroughness and German brains—we are no match for them. The country's thick with spies—wonderful men. Where shall we find their equals?"

A sailor slipped across the hall and dropped into a chair by Hillyard's side.

"You take no part in these discussions? The crackling of thorns—what?"

"I have been a long time away."

"Thought so," continued the sailor. "A man was inquiring for you yesterday—a man of the name of Graham."

Hillyard shook his head.

"I don't know him."

"No, but he is a friend of a friend of yours."

Hillyard sat up in his chair. He had been four days in London, and the engrossing menace of those days had quite thrust from his recollections the telegram which had, as he thought, befooled him.

"The friend of mine is possibly Paul Bendish," he said stiffly.

"Think that was the name. Graham's the man I am speaking of," and the sailor paused. "Commodore Graham," he added.

Hillyard's indignation ebbed away. What if he had not been fooled? The quenched hopes kindled again in him. There was all this talk of war—alarums and excursions as the stage-directions had it. Service! Suddenly he realised that ever since he had left Senga, a vague envy of Harry Luttrell had been springing up in his heart. The ordered life of service—authority on the one hand, the due execution of details on the other! Was it to that glorious end in this crisis that all his life's experience had slowly been gathering? He looked keenly at his companion. Was it just by chance that he had crossed the hall in the midst of all this thistle-down discussion and dropped in the chair by his side?

"But what could I do?"

He spoke aloud, but he was putting the question to himself. The sailor, however, answered it.

"Ask Graham."

He wrote an address upon a sheet of notepaper and handed it to Hillyard. Then he looked at the clock which marked ten minutes past three.

"You will find him there now."

The sailor went after his cap and left the club. Hillyard read the address. It was a number in a little street of the Adelphi, and as he read it, suspicion again seized upon Hillyard. After all, why should a Commodore want to see him in a little street of the Adelphi. Perhaps, after all, the indifferent official of Alexandria was right and the Commodore had ambitions in the line of revues!

"I had better go and have it out with him," he decided, and, taking his hat and stick, he walked eastwards to Charing Cross. He turned into a short street. At the bottom a stone arch showed where once the Thames had lapped. Now, beyond its grey-white curve, were glimpses of green lawns and the cries of children at their play. Hillyard stopped at a house by the side of the arch. A row of brass plates confronted him, but the name of Commodore Graham was engraved on none of them. Hillyard rang the housekeeper's bell and inquired.

"On the top floor on the left," he was told.

He climbed many little flights of stairs, and at the top of each his heart sank a little lower. When the stairs ended he confronted a mean, brown-varnished door; and he almost turned and fled. After all, the monstrous thing looked possible. He stood upon the threshold of a set of chambers. Was he really to be asked to collaborate in a revue? He rang the bell, and a young woman opened the door and barred the way.

"Whom do you wish to see?" she asked.

"Commodore Graham."

"Commodore Graham?" she repeated with an air of perplexity, as though this was the first time she had ever heard the name.

Across her shoulder Hillyard looked into a broad room, where three other girls sat at desks, and against one wall stood a great bureau with many tiny drawers like pigeon-holes. Several of these drawers stood open and disclosed cards standing on their edges and packed against each other. Hillyard's hopes revived. Not for nothing had he sat from seven to ten in the office of a shipping agent at Alicante. Here was a card-index, and of an amazing volume. But his interlocutor still barred the way.

"Have you an appointment with Commodore Graham?" she asked, still with that suggestion that he had lunched too well and had lost his way.

"No. But he sent for me across half the world."

The girl raised a pair of steady grey eyes to his.

"Will you write your name here?"

She allowed him to pass and showed him some slips of paper on a table in the middle of the room. Hillyard obeyed, and waited, and in a few moments she returned, and opened a door, crossed a tiny ante-room and knocked again. Hillyard entered a room which surprised him, so greatly did its size and the wide outlook from its windows contrast with the dinginess of its approach. A thin man with the face of a French abbé sat indolently twiddling his thumbs by the side of a big bureau.

"You wanted to see me?"

"Mr. Hillyard?"

"Yes."

Commodore Graham nodded to the girl, and Hillyard heard the door close behind him.

"Won't you sit down? There are cigarettes beside you. A match? Here is one. I hope that I didn't bring you home before your time."

"The season had ended," replied Hillyard, who was in no mood to commit himself. "In what way can I help you?"

"Bendish tells me that you know something of Spain."

"Spain?" cried Hillyard in surprise. "Spain means Madrid, Bilbao, and a host of places, and a host of people, politicians, merchants, farmers. What should I know of them?"

"You were in Spain for some years."

"Three," replied Hillyard, "and for most of the three years picking up a living along the quays. Oh, it's not so difficult in Spain, especially in summer time. Looking after a felucca while the crew drank in a café, holding on to a dinghy from a yacht and helping the ladies to step out, a little fishing here, smuggling a box of cigars past the customs officer there—oh, it wasn't so difficult. You can sleep out in comfort. I used to enjoy it. There was a coil of rope on the quay at Tarragona; it made a fine bed. Lord, I can feel it now, all round me as I curled up in it, and the stars overhead, seen out of a barrel, so to speak!"

Hillyard's face changed. He had the spark of the true wanderer within him. Even recollections of days long gone could blow it into clear, red flame. All the long glowing days on the hot stones of the water-side, the glitter of the Mediterranean purple-blue under the sun, the coming of night and the sudden twinkling of lights in the cave-dwellings above Almeria and across the bay from Aguilas, the plunge into the warm sea at midnight, the glorious evenings at water-side cafés when he had half a dozen coppers in his pocket; the good nature of the people! All these recollections swept back on him in a rush. The actual hardships, the hunger, the biting winds of January under a steel-cold sky, these things were all forgotten. He remembered the freedom.

"There weren't any hours to the day," he cried, and spoke the creed of all the wanderers in the world. "I saw the finest bull-fights in the world, and made money out of them by selling dulces and membrilla and almond rock from Alicante. Oh, the life wasn't so bad. But it came to an end. A shipping agent at Alicante used me as a messenger, and finally, since I knew English and no one else in his office did, turned me into a shipping clerk."

Hillyard had quite forgotten Commodore Graham, who sat patiently twiddling his thumbs throughout the autobiography, and now came with something of a start to a recognition of where he sat. He sprang up and reached for his hat.

"So, you see, you might as well ask a Chinaman at Stepney what he knows of England as ask me what I know of Spain. I am just wasting your time. But I have to thank you," and he bowed with a winning pleasantness, "for reviving in me some very happy recollections which were growing dim."

The Commodore, however, did not stir.

"But it is possible," he said quietly, "that you do know the very places which interest me—the people too."

Hillyard looked at the Commodore. He put down his hat and resumed his seat.

"For instance?"

"The Columbretes."

Hillyard laughed.

"Islands sixty miles from Valencia."

"With a lighthouse," interrupted Graham.

"And a little tumble-down inn with a vine for an awning."

"Oh! I didn't know there was an inn," said Graham. "Already you have told me something."

"I fished round the Columbretes all one summer," said Hillyard, with a laugh.

Graham nodded two or three times quickly.

"And the Balearics?"

"I worked on one of Island Line ships between Barcelona and Palma through a winter."

"There's a big wireless," said Commodore Graham.

"At Soller. On the other side of Mallorca from Palma. You cross a wonderful pass by the old monastery where Georges Sand and Chopin stayed and quarrelled."

The literary reminiscence left Commodore Graham unmoved.

"Did you ever go to Iviza?"

"For a month with a tourist who dug for ancient pottery."

Graham swung round to his bureau and drummed with the tips of his fingers upon the leather pad. He made no sign which could indicate whether he was satisfied or no. He lit a cigarette and handed the box to Hillyard.

"Did you ever come across a man called José Medina?"

Eleven years had passed since the strange days in Spain, and those eleven years not without their sharp contrasts and full hours. Hillyard's act of memory was the making of a picture. One by one he called up the chain of coast cities wherein he had wandered. Malaga, with its brown cathedral; Almeria and its ancient castle and bright blue-painted houses glowing against the brown and barren hills; Aguilas, with its islets; Cartagena, Gandia, Alicante of the palms; Valencia—and under the trees and on the quays, the boatmen and the captains and the resplendent officials whom he had known! They took shape before him and assumed their names. He dived amongst them for one José Medina.

"Yes," he replied at last, "there was a José Medina. He was a young peasant of Mallorca. He always said jo for yo."

Graham's eyes brightened and his lips twitched to a smile. He glanced aside to his bureau, whereon lay a letter written by Paul Bendish at Oxford.

"He probably has a larger acquaintance with the queer birds of the Mediterranean ports than any one else in England. But he does not seem to be aware of it. But if you persist in sitting quiet his knowledge will trickle out."

Commodore Graham persisted, and facts concerning José Medina began to trickle out. José's father had left him, the result of a Spanish peasant's thrift, a couple of thousand pesetas. With this José Medina had gone to Gibraltar, where he bought a felucca, with a native of Gibraltar as its nominal owner; so that José Medina might fly the flag of Britain and sleep more surely for its protection. At Gibraltar, with what was left of his two thousand pesetas and the credit which his manner gained him, he secured a cargo of tobacco.

"Gibraltar's a free port, you see," said Hillyard. "José ran the cargo along the coast to Benicassim, a little watering-place with a good beach about thirty kilometres east of Valencia. He ran the felucca ashore one dark night." Suddenly he stopped and smiled to himself. "I expect José Medina's in prison now."

"On the contrary," said Graham, "he's a millionaire."

Hillyard stared. Then he laughed.

"Well, those were the two alternatives for José Medina. But I am judging by one night's experience. I never saw him again."

Commodore Graham touched with his heel a bell by the leg of his bureau. The bell did not ring, but displaced a tiny shutter in front of the desk of his secretary in the ante-room; and Hillyard had hardly ended when the girl was in the room and announced:

"Admiral Carstairs."

Commodore Graham looked annoyed.

"What a nuisance! I am afraid that I must see him, Mr. Hillyard."

"Of course," said Hillyard. "Admirals are admirals."

"And they know it!" said Commodore Graham with a sigh.

Hillyard rose and took his hat.

"Well, I am very grateful to you, Mr. Hillyard," said Graham. "I can't say anything more to you now. Things, as you know, are altogether very doubtful. We may slip over into smooth water. On the other hand," and he twiddled his thumbs serenely, "we may be at war in a month. If that were to be the case, I might want to talk with you again. Will you leave your address with Miss Chayne?"

Hillyard was led out by another door, no doubt so that he might not meet the impatient admiral. He might have gone away disheartened from that interview with its vague promises. But there are other and often surer indications than words. When Miss Chayne took down his address, her manner had quite changed towards him. She had now a frank and pleasant comradeship. The official had gone. Her smile said as plainly as print could do: "You are with us now."

Meanwhile Commodore Graham read through once more the letter of Paul Bendish. He turned from that to a cabled report from Khartum of the opinion which various governors of districts had formed concerning the ways and the discretion of Martin Hillyard. Then once more he rang his bell.

"There was a list of suitable private yachts to be made out," he said.

"It is ready," replied Miss Chayne, and she brought it to him.

Over that list Commodore Graham spent a great deal of time. In the end his finger rested on the name of the steam-yacht Dragonfly, owned by Sir Charles Hardiman, Baronet.

CHAPTER IX

Enter the Heroine in anything but White Satin

Goodwood in the year nineteen hundred and fourteen! There were some, throwers of stones, searchers after a new thing on which to build a reputation, who have been preaching these many years past that the temper of England had changed, its solidity all dissolved into froth, and that a new race of neurotics was born on Mafeking night. Just ninety-nine years before this Goodwood meeting, when Napoleon and the veterans of the Imperial Guard were knocking at the gates of Brussels, a famous ball was given. Goodwood of the year nineteen-fourteen, mutatis mutandis, did but repeat that scene, the same phlegmatic enjoyment of the festival, the same light-heartedness and sure confidence under the great shadow, and the same ending.

The whispered word went round so that there should be no panic or alarm, and of a sudden every officer was gone. Goodwood of nineteen fourteen and a July so perfect with sunlight and summer that it seemed some bird at last must break the silence of the famed beech-grove! All the world went to it. The motor-cars and the coaches streamed up over Duncton Hill and wound down the Midhurst Road to pleasant Charlton, with its cottages and gardens of flowers. Martin Hillyard went too.

As he walked away from Captain Graham's eyrie he met Sir Chichester Splay in Pall Mall.

"Where have you been these eight months?" inquired Sir Chichester. "'The Dark Tower' is still running, I see. A good play, Mr. Hillyard."

"But not a great play, of course," said Martin, his lips twitching to a smile.

"I have been looking for you everywhere," remarked Sir Chichester. "You must stay with us for Goodwood. My wife will never forgive me if I don't secure you."

Hillyard gladly consented. It would be his first visit to the high racecourse on the downs—and—and he might find Stella Croyle among the company. It would be a little easier for him and for her too, if they met this second time in a house of many visitors. He had no comfortable news to give to her, and he had shrunk from seeking her out in the Bayswater Road. Wrap the truth in words however careful, he could not but wound her. Yet sooner or later she must hear of his return, and avoidance of her would but tell the story more cruelly than his lips.

"Yes, I will gladly come," he said, "if I may come down on the first day."

He was delayed in London until midday, and so motored after luncheon through Guildford and Chiddingfold and Petworth to Rackham Park. The park ran down to the Midhurst Road, and when Hillyard was shown into the drawing-room he walked across to the window and looked out over a valley of fields and hedges and low, dark ridges to the downs lying blue in the sunlight and the black forests on their slopes.

From an embrasure a girl rose with a book in her hand.

"Let me introduce myself, Mr. Hillyard. I am Joan Whitworth, and make my home here with my aunt. They are all at Goodwood, of course, but they should be back at any moment."

She rang the bell and ordered tea. Somewhere Hillyard realised he had seen the girl before. She was about eighteen years old, he guessed, very pretty, with a wealth of fair hair deepening into brown, dark blue eyes shaded with long dark lashes and a colour of health abloom in her cheeks.

"You have been in Egypt, uncle tells me."

"In the Sudan," Hillyard corrected. "I have been shooting for eight months."

"Shooting!"

Joan Whitworth's eyes were turned on him in frank disappointment. "The author of 'The Dark Tower'—shooting!"

There was more than disappointment in her voice. There was a hint of disdain.

Hillyard did not pursue the argument.

"I knew that I had seen you before. I remember where now. You were with Sir Chichester at the first performance of 'The Dark Tower.' I peeped out behind the curtain of my box and saw you."

Joan's face relaxed.

"Oh, yes, I was there."

"But——" Hillyard began, and caught himself up. He had been on the point of saying that she had a very different aspect in the stalls of the Rubicon Theatre. But he looked her up and down and held his peace. Yet what he did substitute left him in no better case.

"So you have not gone to the races," he said, and once more her lip curled in disdain. She drew herself up to her full height—she was not naturally small, but a good honest piece of English maidenhood.

"Do I look as if I were likely to go to the races?" she asked superbly.

She was dressed in a sort of shapeless flowing gown, saffron in colour, and of a material which, to Hillyard's inexperienced eye, seemed canvas. It spread about her on the ground, and it was high at the throat. A broad starched white collar, like an Eton boy's, surmounted it, and a little black tie was fastened in a bow, and scarves floated untidily around her.

"No, upon my word you do not," cried Hillyard, nettled at last by her haughtiness, and with such a fervour of agreement, that suddenly all her youth rose into Joan Whitworth's face and got the better of her pose. She laughed aloud, frankly, deliciously. And her laugh was still rippling about the room when motor-horns hooted upon the drive.

At once the laughter vanished.

"We shall be amongst horses in a minute," she observed with a sigh. "I can smell the stables already," and she retired to her book in the embrasure of the window.

A joyous and noisy company burst into the room. Sir Chichester, with larger mother-of-pearl buttons on his fawn-coloured overcoat than ever decorated even a welshing bookmaker on Brighton Downs, led Hillyard up to Lady Splay.

"My wife. Millie, Mr. Hillyard."

Hints of Lady Splay's passion for the last new person had prepared Hillyard for a lady at once gushing and talkative. He was surprised to find himself shaking hands with a pleasant, unassuming woman of distinct good looks. Hillyard was presented to Dennis and Miranda Brown, a young couple two years married, and to Mr. Harold Jupp, a man of Hillyard's age. Harold Jupp was a queer-looking person with a long, thin, brown face, and a straight, wide mouth too close to a small pointed chin. Harold Jupp carried about with him a very aura of horses. Horses were his only analogy; he thought in terms of horses; and perhaps, as a consequence, although he could give no reasons for his judgments upon people, those judgments as a rule were conspicuously sound. Jupp shook hands with Hillyard, and turned to the student at the window.

"Well, Joan, how have you lived without us? Aren't you bored with your large, beautiful self?"

Joan looked at him with an annihilating glance, and crossed the room to Millie Splay.

"Bored! How could I be? When I have so many priceless wasted hours to make up for!"

"Yes, yes, my dear," said Millie Splay soothingly. "Come and have some tea."

"That's it, Joan," cried Jupp, unrepressed by the girl's contempt. "Come and have tea with the barbarians."

Joan addressed herself to Dennis Brown, as one condescending from Olympus.

"I hope you had a good day."

"Awful," Dennis Brown admitted. "We ought to have had five nice wins on form. But they weren't trying, Joan. The way Camomile was pulled. I expected to see his neck shut up like a concertina."

"Never mind, boys," said Sir Chichester. "You'll get it back before Friday."

Harold Jupp shook his head doubtfully.

"Never sure about flat-racing. Jumping's the only thing for the poor and honest backer."

Joan Wentworth looked about her regretfully.

"I understand now why you have all come back so early."

Miranda Brown ran impulsively to her. She was as pretty as a picture, and spoke as a rule in a series of charming explosions. At this moment she was deeply wronged.

"Yes, Joan," she cried. "They would go! And I know that I have backed the winner for the last race."

Dennis Brown contemplated his wife with amazement.

"Miranda, you are crazy," he cried. "He can't win."

Harold Jupp agreed regretfully.

"He's a Plater. That's the truth. A harmless, unnecessary Plater. I sit at the feet of Miranda Brown, Joan, but as regards horses, she doesn't know salt from sugar."

Miranda looked calmly at her watch.

"He has already won."

Tea was brought in and consumed. At the end of it Dennis Brown observed to Harold Jupp:

"We ought to arrange what we are going to do to-morrow."

Both men rose, and each drew from one pocket a programme of the next day's events, and from the other a little paper-covered volume called "Form at a Glance." Armed with their paraphernalia, they retired to a table in a window.

"Come and live the higher life with us, Joan," cried Harold Jupp. "What are you reading?"

"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society," Joan returned icily. But pride burned through the ice, and was audible.

"He sounds just like a Plater," replied Harold Jupp.

Meanwhile Dennis Brown was immersed in his programme.

"The first race is too easy," he announced.

"Yes," said Jupp. "It's sticking out a foot. Peppercorn."

Dennis Brown stared at his friend.

"Don't be silly! Simon Jackson will romp home."

Harold Jupp consulted his little brown book.

"Peppercorn ran second to Petronella at Newbury, giving her nine pounds. Petronella met Simon Jackson at even weights at Newcastle, and Simon Jackson was left in the country. Peppercorn must win."

"Let us hear the names of the others," interrupted Miranda, running up to the table.

Harold Jupp read out the names.

"Smoky Boy, Paper Crown, House on Fire, Jemima Puddleduck——" and Miranda clapped her hands.

"Jemima Puddleduck's going to win."

Both the young men stared at her, then both plunged their noses into their books.

"Jemima Puddleduck," Dennis Brown read, "out of Side Springs, by the Quack."

"Oh, what a pedigree!" cried Miranda. "She must win."

Jupp wrinkled his forehead.

"But she's done nothing. Why must she win?" asked Dennis.

Miranda shrugged her shoulders at the ineffable stupidity of the young man with whom she was linked.

"Listen to her name! Jemima Puddleduck! She can't lose!"

Both the young men dropped their books and gazed at one another hopelessly. Here was the whole scientific business of spotting winners, through research into pedigrees, weights, records, the favourite distances and race courses of this or that runner, so completely disregarded that racing might really be a matter of chance.

"I'll tell you, Miranda," said Harold Jupp. "Jemima Puddleduck's a Plater."

The awful condemnation had no sooner been pronounced than the butler, with his attendant footman, appeared to remove the tea.

"We have just heard over the telephone, sir," he said to Sir Chichester, "the winner of the last race."

"Oh!" cried Miranda breathlessly. "Which was it?"

"Chewing Gum."

Miranda swept round to her husband, radiant. "There, what did I tell you? Chewing Gum. What were the odds, Harper?" She turned again to the butler. "Oh, you do know, don't you?"

"Yes, madam, twelve to one. They say he rolled home."

Miranda Brown jumped in the air.

"Oh, I have won a hundred and twenty pounds."

Harold Jupp was sympathetic and consolatory.

"Of course it's a mistake, Miranda. I am awfully sorry! Chewing Gum ran nowhere to Earthly Paradise in the Newberry Stakes this year, and Earthly Paradise, all out to win, was beaten a month ago by seven lengths at Warwick, by Rollicking Lady. And Rollicking Lady was in this race too. So you see it's impossible. Chewing Gum's a Plater."

Miranda wrung her hands.

"But, Harold, he did win; didn't he, Harper?"

"There's no doubt about it, madam," replied the butler with dignity. "I 'av verified the hinformation from other sources."

He left the two experts blinking. Dennis was the first to recover from the blow.

"What on earth made you back him, Miranda?"

Miranda sailed to the side of Joan Whitworth.

"You are both of you so very unpleasant that I am seriously inclined not to tell you. But I always back horses with the names of things to eat."

The two scientists were dumb. They stared open-mouthed. Somewhere, it seemed, a religion tottered upon its foundations. Sacrilege itself could hardly have gone further than Miranda Brown had gone.

"But—but," Harold Jupp stammered feebly, "you don't eat chewing gum."

Miranda flattened him out with a question.

"What becomes of it, then?" and there was no answer. But Miranda was not content with her triumph. She must needs carry the war unwisely into the enemy's camp.

"After all, what in the world can have possessed you, Dennis, to back a silly old mare like Barmaid?"

Dennis Brown saw his opportunity.

"I always back horses with the names of things to kiss," he declared.

Jupp laughed aloud; Sir Chichester chuckled; Miranda looked as haughty as good-humour and a dainty personality enabled her to do.

"Vulgar, don't you think?" she asked of Joan. "But racing men are vulgar. Oh, Joan! have you thought out your book to-day? Can you now begin to write it? Will you write it in the window, with the South Downs in front of your eyes? Oh, it'll be wonderful!"

"What ho!" cried Mr. Jupp. "Miranda has joined the highbrows."

Dennis Brown was too seriously occupied to waste his time upon Miranda's enthusiasms.

"It's a pity we can't get the evening papers," he said gloomily. "I should dearly like to see the London forecasts for to-morrow."

"I brought some evening papers down with me," said Hillyard, and "Did you?" cried Sir Chichester, and his eyes flashed with interest. But Harold Jupp was already out of the room. He came back from the hall with a bundle of newspapers in his hands, pink and white and yellow and green. He carried them all relentlessly past Sir Chichester to the table in the window. Sir Chichester to a newspaper, was a needle to a magnet; and while Dennis Brown read out the selections for the morrow's races of "The Man of Iron" in the Evening Patriot, and "Hitchy Koo" in The Lamppost, Sir Chichester edged nearer and nearer.

Lady Splay invited Hillyard to play croquet with her in the garden; and half-way through the game Hillyard approached the question which troubled him.

"I was wondering whether I should meet Mrs. Croyle here."

Millicent Splay drove her ball before she answered, and missed her hoop.

"What a bore!" she cried. "Now I shall have to come back again. I didn't know that you had met Stella."

"I met her only once. I liked her."

Millie Splay nodded.

"I am glad. There's always a room here for Stella. I told her so immediately after I met her, and she took me at my word, as I meant her to do. But she avoids Goodwood week and festivals generally, and she is wise. For though I would take her anywhere myself, you know what long memories people have for other people's sins. There might be humiliations."

"I understand that," said Hillyard, and he added, "I gathered from Mrs. Croyle that you had remained a very staunch friend."

Millie Splay shrugged her shoulders.

"I am a middle-aged woman with a middle-aged woman's comprehension. There are heaps of things I loathe more and more each day, meanness, for instance, and an evil tongue. But, for the other sins, more and more I see the case for compassion. Stella was hungry of heart, and she let the hunger take her. She had her blind, wild hour or two; she was a fool; she was—well, everything the moralists choose to call her. But she has been paying for her hour ever since, and will go on paying. Now, if I can only hit your yellow ball from here, I shall have rather a good game on."

Lady Splay succeeded and, carrying the four croquet balls with her, went round the rest of the hoops and pegged out.

"I must go in and change," she said, and suddenly, in a voice of melancholy, she cried, "Oh, I do wish——" and stopped.

"What?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter," she answered. But her eyes were upon the window, where Joan Whitworth stood in full view in all her disfiguring panoply. Lady Splay wrung her hands helplessly. "Oh, dear, dear, if she weren't so thorough!" she moaned.

When they returned into the drawing-room, Sir Chichester was still standing near to Harold Jupp and Dennis Brown, shifting from one foot to another, and making little inarticulate sounds in his throat.

"Haven't you two finished yet?" asked Millicent Splay.

"Just," said Dennis Brown, rubbing his hands together with a laugh, "and we ought to have four nice wins to-morrow."

"Good!" said Sir Chichester. "Then might I have a newspaper?"

"But of course," said Dennis Brown, and he handed one over the table to him. "You haven't been waiting for it all this time, Sir Chichester?"

"Oh no, no, no," exclaimed Sir Chichester, quickly. He glanced with a swift and experienced eye down the columns, and tossed the paper aside.

"Might I have another?"

"But of course, sir."

The second paper was disposed of as rapidly as the first, and the others followed in their turn.

"Nothing in them," said Sir Chichester with a resigned air. "Nothing in them at all."

Millie Splay laughed.

"All that my husband means is that his name is not to be found in any one of them."

"The occurrence seems so rare that he has no great reason to complain," said Hillyard; and, in order to assuage any disappointment which might still be rankling in the baronet's bosom, Hillyard related at the dinner-table, with the necessary discretions, his election to the mess at Senga.

Sir Chichester was elated. "So far away my name is known! Really, that is very pleasant hearing!"

There was no offence to him in the reason of his honorary membership of the Senga mess, which, however carefully Hillyard sought to hide it, could not but peep out. Sir Chichester neither harboured illusions himself as to his importance nor sought to foster them in others. There was none of the "How do these things get into the papers?" about him.

"I am not a public character. So I have to take trouble to keep myself in print. And I do—a deuce of a lot of trouble."

"Now, why?" asked Harold Jupp, who possessed an inquiring mind and was never satisfied by anything but the most definite statements.

"Because I like it," replied Sir Chichester. "I am used to it, and I like it. Unless I see my name in real print every morning, I have all day the uncomfortable sensation that I am not properly dressed."

Millie Splay and the others round the table, with the exception of one person, laughed. To that one person, Sir Chichester here turned good-humouredly:

"All right, you can turn your nose up, Joan. It seems extraordinary to you that I should like to see my name in print. I can tell you something more extraordinary than that. The public likes it too. Just because I am not a public character, every reference to me must be of an exclusively personal kind. And that's just the sort of reference which the public eats. It is much more thrilled by the simple announcement that a Sir Chichester Splay, of whom it has never heard, has bought a new pair of purple socks with white stripes than it would be by a full account of a Cabinet crisis."

Once more the company laughed at Sir Chichester's apology for his foible.

Lady Splay turned to Hillyard.

"And who is the ingenious man who discovered this way of keeping the peace at Senga?"

Hillyard suddenly hesitated.

"A great friend of mine," he answered with his eyes on Millie Splay's face. "He was with me at Oxford. A Captain Luttrell."

But it was clear almost at once that the name had no associations in Lady Splay's mind. She preferred to entertain her friends in the country than to live in town. She knew little of what gossip might run the streets of London; and since Luttrell was, as yet, like Sir Chichester, in that he was not a public character, there had been no wide-run gossip about Stella Croyle or himself which Millicent Splay was likely to meet.

Hillyard thought at first, that with a woman's self-control she turned a blank face to him of a set purpose. But one little movement of hers reassured him. Her eyes turned towards Joan Whitworth, as though asking whether this Harry Luttrell was a match for her, and she said:

"You must bring your friend down to see us, when he comes back to England. We are almost acquainted as it is."

No! Millicent Splay did not connect Harry Luttrell with Stella Croyle. It would have been better if Hillyard, that very night, had enlightened her. But he was neither a gossip nor a meddler. It was not possible that he should.

CHAPTER X

The Summons

It is curious to recollect how smoothly the surface water ran during that last week of peace. Debates there were, of course, and much argument across the table. It was recognised that great changes, social, economic, military, would come and great adaptations have to be made. But, meanwhile, to use the phrase which was soon to be familiar in half a million mouths, people carried on. The Brown couple, for instance. Each morning they set out gaily, certain of three or four nice wins; each evening they returned after a day which was "simply awful." Harold Jupp was at hand with his unfailing remedy.

"We'll go jumping in the winter and get it all back easily. Flat racing's no good for the poor. The Lords don't come jumping."

Joan Whitworth carried on too, in her sackcloth and sashes. She was moved by the enthusiastic explosions of Miranda Brown to reveal some details of the great novel which was then in the process of incubation.

"She insists on being married in a violet dress," said Joan, "with the organ playing the 'Funeral March of a Marionette.'"

"Oh, isn't that thrilling!" cried Miranda.

"But why does she insist upon these unusual arrangements?" asked Harold Jupp.

Joan brushed his question aside.

"It was symbolical of her."

"Yes. Linda would have done that," said Miranda. "I suppose her marriage turns out very unhappily?"

"It had to," said Joan, quite despondent over this unalterable necessity.

"Now, why?" asked Jupp in a perplexity.

"Her husband never understood her."

"What ho!" cried Dennis Brown, looking up from his scientific researches into "Form at a Glance."

"I expect that he talked racing all day," said Miranda.

Dennis Brown treated the rejoinder with contempt. His eyes were fixed sympathetically on the young writer-to-be.

"I hate crabbing any serious effort to elevate us, Joan, but, honestly, doesn't it all sound a little conventional?"

He could have used no epithet more deplorable. Joan shot at him one annihilating glance. Miranda bubbled with indignation.

"Don't notice them, Joan dear! They don't know the meaning of words. They are ribald, uneducated people. You call your heroine Linda? Linda—what?"

Mr. Jupp supplied a name.

"Linda Spavinsky," said he. "She comes of the ancient Scottish family of that name."

"Pig! O pig!" cried Joan, routed at last from her superior serenity; and a second afterwards her eyes danced and with a flash of sound white teeth she broke into honest laughter. She did her best to suppress her sense of fun, but it would get the better of her from time to time.

This onslaught upon Joan Whitworth took place on the Wednesday evening. Sir Chichester came into the room as it ended, with a telegram in his hand.

"Mario Escobar wires, Millie, that he is held up in London by press of work and will only be able to run down here on Friday for the night."

Hillyard looked up.

"Mario Escobar?"

"Do you know him?" asked Millie Splay.

"Slightly," answered Hillyard. "Press of work! What does he do?"

"Runs about with the girls," said Dennis Brown.

Sir Chichester Splay would not have the explanation.

"Nonsense, my dear Dennis, nonsense, nonsense! He has a great many social engagements of the most desirable kind. He is, I believe, interested in some shipping firms."

"I like him," said Millie Splay.

"And so do I," added Joan, "very much indeed." The statement was defiantly thrown at Harold Jupp.

"I think he is charming," said Miranda.

Harold Jupp looked from one to the other.

"That seems to settle it, doesn't it? But——"

"But what?" asked Sir Chichester.

"Need we listen to the ridiculous exhibitions of male jealousy?" Miranda asked plaintively.

"But," Harold Jupp repeated firmly, "I do like a man to have another address besides his club. Now, I will lay a nice five to one that no one in this room knows where Mario Escobar goes when he goes home."

A moment's silence followed upon Harold Jupp's challenge. To the men, the point had its importance. The women did not appreciate the importance, but they recognised that their own menfolk did, and they did not interrupt.

"It's true," said Sir Chichester, "I always hear from him with his club as his address. But it simply means that he lives at an hotel and is not sure that he will remain on."

Thus the little things of every day occupied the foreground of Rackham Park. Millicent Splay had her worries of which Joan Whitworth was the cause. She loved Joan; she was annoyed with Joan; she admired Joan; she was amused at Joan; and she herself could never have told you which of these four emotions had the upper hand. So inextricably were they intermingled.

She poured them out to Martin Hillyard, as they drove through the Park at Midhurst on the Thursday morning.

"What do you think of Joan?" she asked. "She is beautiful, isn't she, with that mass of golden hair and her eyes?"

"Yes, she is," answered Hillyard.

"And what a fright she is making of herself! She isn't dressed at all, is she? She is just—protected by her clothes."

Hillyard laughed and Millicent Splay sighed. "And I did hope she would have got over it all by Goodwood. But no! Really I could slap her. But I might have known! Joan never does things by halves."

"She seems thorough," said Hillyard, although he remembered, with some doubts as to the truth of his comment, moments now and again when more primitive impulses had bubbled up in Joan Whitworth.

"Thorough! Yes, that's the word. Oh, Mr. Hillyard, there was a time when she really dressed—dressed, you understand. My word, she was thorough then, too. I remember coming out of the Albert Hall on a Melba afternoon, when we could get nothing but a hansom cab, and a policeman actually had to lift her up into it like a big baby because her skirt was so tight. And look at her now!"

Millicent Splay thumped the side of the car in her vexation.

"But you mustn't think she's a fool." Lady Splay turned menacingly on the silent Hillyard.

"But I don't," he protested.

"That's the last thing to say about her."

"I never said it," declared Martin Hillyard.

"I should have lost my faith in you, if you had," rejoined Millicent Splay, even now hardly mollified.

But she could not avoid the subject. Here was a new-comer to Rackham Park. She could not bear that he should carry away a wrong impression of her darling.

"I'll tell you the truth about Joan. She has lived her sheltered life with us, and no real things have yet come near her. No real troubles, no deep joys. Her parents even died when she was too young to know them. But she is eighteen and alive to her finger-tips. Therefore she's—expectant."

"Yes," Hillyard agreed.

"She is searching for the meaning, for the secrets of life, sure that there is a meaning, sure that there are secrets, if only she could get hold of them. But she hasn't got hold of them. She runs here. She runs there. She explores, she experiments. That's why she's dressed like a tramp and thinking out a book where the heroine gets married to the Funeral March of a Marionette. Oh, my dear person, it just means, as it always means with us poor creatures, that the right man hasn't come along."

Millie Splay leaned back in her seat.

"When he does!" she cried. "When he does! Did you see the magnolia this morning? It burst into flower during the night. Joan! I thought once that it might be Harold Jupp. But it isn't."

Lady Splay spoke with discouragement. She had the matchmaking fever in her blood. Martin Hillyard remembered her glance when he had casually spoken of Harry Luttrell. Then she startled him with words which he was never to forget, and in which he chose to find a real profundity.

"The right man has not come along. So Joan mistakes anything odd for something great, and thinks that to be unusual is to be strong. It's a mood of young people who have not yet waked up."

They drove to the private stand and walked through into the paddock. Millie Splay looked round at the gay and brilliant throng. She sighed.

"There she is, moping in the drawing-room over Prince Hohenstiel—whatever his name is. She won't come to Goodwood. No, she just won't."

Yet Joan Whitworth did come to Goodwood that year, though not upon this day.

No one in that household had read the newspapers so carefully each day as Martin Hillyard. As the prospect darkened each morning, he was in a distress lest a letter should not have been forwarded from his flat in London, or should have been lost in the post. Each evening when the party returned from the races his first question asked whether there was no telegram awaiting him. So regular and urgent were his inquiries that the house-party could not be ignorant of his preoccupation. And on the afternoon of the Thursday a telegram in its orange envelope was lying upon the hall-table.

"It's for you, Mr. Hillyard," said Lady Splay.

Hillyard held it in his hands. So the summons had come, the summons hoped for, despaired of, made so often into a whip wherewith he lashed his arrogance, the summons to serve.

"I shall have to go up to town this evening," he said.

Anxious faces gathered about him.

"Oh, don't do that!" said Harold Jupp. "We have just got to like you."

"Yes, wait until to-morrow, my dear boy," Sir Chichester suggested. Even Joan Whitworth descended to earth and requested that he should stay.

"It's awfully kind of you," stammered Martin. "But I am afraid that this is very important."

Lady Splay was practical.

"Hadn't you better see first?" she asked.

Hillyard, with his thoughts playing swiftly in the future like a rapier, was still standing stock-still with the unopened telegram in his hand.

"Of course," he said. "But I know already what it is."

The anxious little circle closed nearer as he tore open the envelope. He read:

"I have refused the Duke. Money is cash—I mean trash. Little one I am yours.—Linda Spavinsky."

The telegram had been sent that afternoon from Chichester.

Hillyard gazed around at the serious faces which hemmed him in. It became a contest as to whose face should hold firm longest. Joan herself was the first to flee, and she was found rocking to and fro in silent laughter in a corner of the library. Then Hillyard himself burst into a roar.

"I bought that fairly," he admitted, and he went up several points in the estimation of them all.

The last day of the races came—all sunshine and hot summer; lights and shadows chasing across the downs, the black slopes of Charlton forest on the one side, parks and green fields and old brown houses, sloping to the silver Solent, upon the other; and in the centre of the plain, by Bosham water, the spire of Chichester Cathedral piercing the golden air. Paddock and lawn and the stands were filled until about two in the afternoon. Then the gaps began to show to those who were concerned to watch. Especially about the oval railings in the paddock, within which, dainty as cats and with sleek shining skins, the racehorses stepped, the crowd grew thin. And in a few moments, the word had run round like fire, "The officers had gone."

Hillyard stood reflecting upon the stupendous fact. Never had he so bitterly regretted that physical disqualification which banned him from their company. Never had he so envied Luttrell. He was in the uttermost depression when a small, brown-gloved hand touched his arm. He turned and saw Joan Whitworth at his side, her lovely face alive with excitement, her eyes most friendly. It was hardly at all the Joan he knew. Joan had courage, but to face Goodwood in the clothes she affected at Rackham Park was beyond it. From her grey silk stockings and suède shoes to the little smart blue hat which sat so prettily on her hair, she was, as Millicent Splay would have admitted, really dressed.

"There is a real telegram for you," she said. She held it out to him enclosed in an envelope which had been already opened.

"Please come to see me—Graham," he read, and the actual receipt of the message stirred within him such a whirl of emotion that, for a moment or two, Joan Whitworth spoke and he was not aware of it. Suddenly, however, he understood that she was speaking words of importance.

"I hope I did right to open it," she said. "Colonel Brockley rode over this morning to tell us that his son had been recalled to his battalion by a telegram. I knew you were expecting one. When this one came, I thought that it might be important and that you ought to have it at once. On the other hand it might be another telegram," and her face dimpled into smiles, "from Linda Spavinsky. I didn't know what to do about it. But Mario Escobar was quite certain that I ought to open it."

"Mario Escobar?" cried Hillyard.

"Yes. He had just arrived. He was quite certain that we ought to open it, so we did."

"We?" A note of regret in his voice made her ask anxiously:

"Was I wrong?"

Hillyard hastened to reassure her.

"Not a bit. Of course you were quite right, and I am very grateful."

Joan's face cleared again.

"You see, I thought that if it was important I could bring it over and drive you back again."

"Will you?" Hillyard asked eagerly. "But now you are here you ought to stay."

Joan would not hear of the proposal, and Hillyard himself was in a fever to be off. They found Sir Chichester and his wife in the paddock, and Hillyard wished his hosts good-bye. Mario Escobar, who had driven over with Joan Whitworth, was talking to them. Escobar turned to Martin Hillyard.

"We met at Sir Charles Hardiman's supper party. You have not forgotten? You are off? A new play, I hope, to go into rehearsal."

He smiled and bowed, and waved his hands. Hillyard went away with Joan Whitworth and mounted beside her into a little two-seated car which she had been accustomed to drive in her unregenerate days. She had not forgotten her skill, and she sent the little car spinning up and down the road into the hills. It was an afternoon of blue and gold, with the larks singing out of sight in the sky. The road wound up and down, dark hedges on one side, fields yellow with young wheat upon the other, and the scent of the briar-rose in the air. Joan said very little, and Hillyard was content to watch her as she drove, the curls blowing about her ears and her hands steady and sure upon the wheel as she swung the car round the corners and folds of the hills. Once she asked of him:

"Are you glad to go?"

He made no pretence of misunderstanding her.

"Very," he answered. "If the great trial is coming, I want to fall back into the rank and file. Pushing and splashing is for peace times."

"Oh, I understand that!" she cried.

These were the young days. The jealousies of Departments, the intrigues to pull this man down and put that man up, not because of his capacity or failure, but because he fitted or did not fit the inner politics of the Office, the capture of honours by the stay-at-homes—all the little miseries and horrors that from time immemorial have disfigured the management of wars—they lay in the future. With millions of people, as with this couple speeding among the uplands, the one thought was—the great test is at hand.

"You go up to London to-night, and it may be a long while before we see you," said Joan. She brought the car to a halt on the edge of Duncton Hill. "Look for luck and for memory at the Weald of Sussex," she cried with a little catch in her throat.

Fields and great trees, and here and there the white smoke of a passing train and beyond the Blackdown and the misty slopes of Leith Hill—Hillyard was never to forget it, neither that scene nor the eager face and shining eyes of Joan Whitworth against the blue and gold of the summer afternoon.

"You will remember that you have friends here, who will be glad to hear news of you," she said, and she threw in the clutch and started the car down the hill.

CHAPTER XI

Stella Runs To Earth

"You have been back in England long?" asked Stella Croyle.

"A little while," said Hillyard evasively.

It was the first week of September. But since his return from Rackham Park to London his days had been passed in the examination of files of documents; and what little time he had enjoyed free from that labour had been given to quiet preparations for his departure.

"You might have come to see me," Stella Croyle suggested. "You knew that I wished to see you."

"Yes, but I have been very busy," he answered. "I am going away."

Stella Croyle looked at him curiously.

"You too! You have joined up?"

Hillyard shook his head.

"No good," he answered. "I told you my lungs were my weak point. I am turned down—and I am going abroad. It's not very pleasant to find oneself staying on in London, going to a little dinner party here and there where all the men are oldish, when all of one's friends have gone."

Stella Croyle's face and voice softened.

"Yes. I can understand that," she said.

Hillyard watched her narrowly, but there was no doubt that she was sincere. She had received him with an air of grievance, and a hard accent in her voice. But she was entering now into a comprehension of the regrets which must be troubling him.

"I am sorry," she continued. "I never cared very much for women. I have very few friends amongst them. And so I am losing—every one." She held out her hand to him in sympathy. "But if I were a man and had been turned down by the doctors, I don't think that I could stay. I should go like you and hide."

She smiled and poured out two cups of tea.

"That is a habit of yours, even though you are not a man," Hillyard replied.

"What do you mean?"

"You run away and hide."

Stella looked at her visitor in surprise.

"Who told you that?"

"Sir Charles Hardiman."

Stella Croyle was silent for a few moments.

"Yes, that's true," and she laughed suddenly. "When things go wrong, I become rather impossible. I have often made up my mind to live entirely in the country, but I never carry the plan out."

She let Hillyard drink his tea and light a cigarette before she approached the question which was torturing her.

"You had a good time in the Sudan!" she began. "Lots of heads?"

"Yes. I had a perfect time."

"And your friend? Captain Luttrell. Did you meet him?"

Hillyard had pondered on the answer which he would give to her when she asked that question. If he answered, "Yes,"—why, then he must go on, he must tell her something of what passed between Luttrell and himself, how he delivered his message and what answer he received. Let him wrap that answer up in words, however delicate and vague, she would see straight to the answer. Her heart would lead her there. To plead forgetfulness would be merely to acknowledge that he slighted her; and she would not believe him. So he lied.

"No. I never met Luttrell. He was away down in Khordofan when I was on the White Nile."

Stella Croyle had turned a little away from Hillyard when she put the question; and she sat now with her face averted for a long while. Nothing broke the silence but the ticking of the clock.

"I am sorry," said Hillyard.

No doubt her disappointment was bitter. She had counted very much, no doubt, on this chance of the two men meeting; on her message reaching her lover, and a "little word" now and again from him coming to her hands. Some morning she would wake up and find an envelope in the familiar writing waiting upon the tray beside her tea—that, no doubt, had been the hope which she had lived on this many a day. Hillyard was not fool enough to hold that he understood either the conclusions at which women arrived, or the emotions by which they jumped to them. But he attributed these hopes and thoughts with some confidence to Stella Croyle—until she turned and showed him her face. The sympathy and gentleness had gone from it. She was white with passion and her eyes blazed.

"Why do you lie to me?" she cried. "I met Harry this morning."

Hillyard was more startled by the news of Luttrell's presence in London than confused by the detection of his lie.